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A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People by a master of suspense

I encountered this tale some time back and it has stayed with me since then. The so-called seasonal visitors are the Allisons from the city, who lease the same off-grid rural cabin each year. This time, instead of returning to the city, they decide to extend their vacation an extra month – a decision that to disturb each resident in the nearby town. Everyone conveys a similar vague warning that no one has ever stayed by the water past the end of summer. Nonetheless, the couple are resolved to remain, and that is the moment events begin to get increasingly weird. The person who supplies oil declines to provide for them. Nobody agrees to bring groceries to the cottage, and when they attempt to drive into town, the car fails to start. A tempest builds, the energy in the radio die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the two old people huddled together in their summer cottage and anticipated”. What might be they expecting? What might the residents know? Every time I peruse the writer’s unnerving and thought-provoking narrative, I recall that the best horror stems from the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman

In this short story two people go to a typical coastal village where church bells toll constantly, an incessant ringing that is irritating and inexplicable. The opening extremely terrifying scene happens during the evening, at the time they decide to take a walk and they fail to see the water. Sand is present, there is the odor of putrid marine life and salt, there are waves, but the ocean seems phantom, or a different entity and more dreadful. It’s just deeply malevolent and each occasion I go to a beach after dark I remember this story which spoiled the sea at night in my view – favorably.

The recent spouses – she’s very young, the man is mature – head back to the hotel and learn why the bells ring, through an extended episode of claustrophobia, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth encounters grim ballet chaos. It’s an unnerving contemplation on desire and decay, two bodies maturing in tandem as a couple, the bond and brutality and gentleness in matrimony.

Not merely the scariest, but likely among the finest brief tales available, and an individual preference. I encountered it en español, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to appear in this country several years back.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer

I perused this book by a pool in the French countryside recently. Even with the bright weather I felt cold creep within me. Additionally, I sensed the electricity of fascination. I was composing a new project, and I faced a block. I wasn’t sure whether there existed a proper method to write some of the fearful things the story includes. Going through this book, I understood that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the book is a grim journey within the psyche of a murderer, the main character, based on Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who slaughtered and cut apart 17 young men and boys in a city over a decade. As is well-known, Dahmer was consumed with creating a zombie sex slave who would stay by his side and attempted numerous grisly attempts to achieve this.

The acts the novel describes are appalling, but similarly terrifying is its psychological persuasiveness. Quentin P’s dreadful, broken reality is directly described with concise language, identities hidden. The reader is immersed trapped in his consciousness, obliged to observe mental processes and behaviors that shock. The foreignness of his thinking feels like a physical shock – or getting lost on a desolate planet. Entering this story is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are absorbed completely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and later started having night terrors. Once, the horror involved a nightmare where I was stuck within an enclosure and, as I roused, I realized that I had removed the slat from the window, trying to get out. That home was decaying; when storms came the downstairs hall flooded, insect eggs dropped from above into the bedroom, and once a large rat ascended the window coverings in that space.

Once a companion presented me with the story, I had moved out with my parents, but the narrative regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs appeared known in my view, homesick at that time. It’s a story featuring a possessed loud, sentimental building and a young woman who consumes calcium from the cliffs. I loved the story deeply and went back frequently to the story, consistently uncovering {something