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A Renowned Horror Author

A Chilling Tale by a master of suspense

I discovered this story some time back and it has haunted me ever since. The named vacationers turn out to be a family urban dwellers, who occupy an identical isolated rural cabin annually. On this occasion, instead of going back to urban life, they choose to extend their vacation an extra month – something that seems to alarm everyone in the adjacent village. All pass on the same veiled caution that not a soul has ever stayed in the area past the holiday. Regardless, the couple are resolved to stay, and at that point things start to get increasingly weird. The person who supplies oil won’t sell to the couple. No one will deliver supplies to the cottage, and when they attempt to go to the village, their vehicle fails to start. A tempest builds, the batteries in the radio die, and when night comes, “the aged individuals huddled together inside their cabin and expected”. What might be they expecting? What might the locals know? Each occasion I revisit Jackson’s disturbing and thought-provoking story, I’m reminded that the best horror originates in the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a pair journey to a common seaside town in which chimes sound continuously, a constant chiming that is bothersome and inexplicable. The initial extremely terrifying scene takes place during the evening, at the time they decide to take a walk and they are unable to locate the ocean. The beach is there, there’s the smell of putrid marine life and brine, waves crash, but the sea is a ghost, or something else and even more alarming. It is simply deeply malevolent and every time I visit to a beach after dark I recall this story that ruined the sea at night in my view – in a good way.

The newlyweds – the woman is adolescent, he’s not – head back to their lodging and learn the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of enclosed spaces, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth meets grim ballet bedlam. It’s a chilling meditation on desire and decline, a pair of individuals aging together as a couple, the bond and violence and tenderness in matrimony.

Not merely the most terrifying, but perhaps among the finest brief tales available, and a personal favourite. I encountered it in the Spanish language, in the first edition of these tales to appear in Argentina a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer

I perused this book near the water overseas a few years ago. Although it was sunny I experienced cold creep over me. I also felt the electricity of fascination. I was writing my latest book, and I encountered an obstacle. I was uncertain if it was possible any good way to craft certain terrifying elements the story includes. Reading Zombie, I understood that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the novel is a grim journey into the thoughts of a criminal, Quentin P, modeled after a notorious figure, the serial killer who slaughtered and dismembered 17 young men and boys in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, Dahmer was consumed with producing a submissive individual that would remain with him and attempted numerous horrific efforts to achieve this.

The acts the story tells are appalling, but equally frightening is its mental realism. The protagonist’s awful, fragmented world is plainly told with concise language, identities hidden. The audience is immersed trapped in his consciousness, obliged to observe thoughts and actions that horrify. The strangeness of his psyche is like a tangible impact – or getting lost on a desolate planet. Going into this book is not just reading but a complete immersion. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel from Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and eventually began experiencing nightmares. At one point, the horror involved a nightmare in which I was stuck within an enclosure and, upon awakening, I realized that I had ripped a part from the window, attempting to escape. That house was crumbling; when storms came the downstairs hall filled with water, fly larvae fell from the ceiling into the bedroom, and at one time a sizeable vermin climbed the drapes in the bedroom.

Once a companion handed me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was no longer living at my family home, but the narrative of the house high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar to myself, nostalgic as I felt. It is a story concerning a ghostly clamorous, sentimental building and a young woman who consumes limestone from the shoreline. I adored the book so much and returned repeatedly to it, always finding {something