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A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People from a master of suspense

I read this tale years ago and it has lingered with me ever since. The so-called seasonal visitors turn out to be a family from New York, who occupy a particular isolated rural cabin each year. On this occasion, instead of heading back home, they choose to extend their holiday a few more weeks – something that seems to alarm all the locals in the adjacent village. All pass on the same veiled caution that not a soul has lingered by the water past the holiday. Nonetheless, they are determined to not leave, and that’s when things start to grow more bizarre. The man who delivers oil refuses to sell to them. No one is willing to supply food to the cabin, and when the family endeavor to travel to the community, the automobile fails to start. A storm gathers, the power in the radio die, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple huddled together in their summer cottage and waited”. What might be they anticipating? What could the locals understand? Each occasion I read Jackson’s chilling and thought-provoking narrative, I remember that the best horror comes from the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman

In this concise narrative a pair travel to an ordinary seaside town where church bells toll continuously, a perpetual pealing that is irritating and unexplainable. The opening truly frightening episode happens during the evening, as they choose to take a walk and they are unable to locate the sea. The beach is there, there is the odor of rotting fish and seawater, surf is audible, but the sea is a ghost, or something else and more dreadful. It is simply insanely sinister and every time I travel to a beach at night I remember this tale which spoiled the ocean after dark to my mind – in a good way.

The newlyweds – she’s very young, the husband is older – go back to their lodging and discover why the bells ring, during a prolonged scene of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden intersects with danse macabre bedlam. It’s an unnerving contemplation on desire and decline, two people aging together as a couple, the connection and aggression and tenderness within wedlock.

Not merely the most terrifying, but probably among the finest brief tales out there, and a personal favourite. I experienced it in the Spanish language, in the debut release of Aickman stories to be released in this country several years back.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer

I perused this narrative near the water in the French countryside in 2020. Despite the sunshine I experienced an icy feeling through me. I also felt the excitement of anticipation. I was composing my latest book, and I faced an obstacle. I wasn’t sure if there was an effective approach to write certain terrifying elements the story includes. Reading Zombie, I realized that it was possible.

Published in 1995, the book is a grim journey through the mind of a young serial killer, Quentin P, modeled after Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who murdered and dismembered 17 young men and boys in a city between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, the killer was obsessed with producing a compliant victim who would stay by his side and attempted numerous macabre trials to accomplish it.

The actions the book depicts are terrible, but equally frightening is its mental realism. The protagonist’s dreadful, shattered existence is simply narrated in spare prose, names redacted. The reader is immersed caught in his thoughts, compelled to see thoughts and actions that shock. The strangeness of his psyche resembles a physical shock – or getting lost on a desolate planet. Going into this story is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching from a gifted writer

During my youth, I sleepwalked and later started suffering from bad dreams. Once, the fear featured a nightmare in which I was trapped within an enclosure and, upon awakening, I realized that I had removed the slat from the window, seeking to leave. That home was falling apart; when storms came the entranceway filled with water, fly larvae came down from the roof into the bedroom, and on one occasion a large rat climbed the drapes in my sister’s room.

When a friend handed me this author’s book, I had moved out in my childhood residence, but the narrative of the house located on the coastline appeared known to myself, longing as I was. It’s a book featuring a possessed loud, atmospheric home and a female character who eats chalk from the shoreline. I cherished the novel so much and returned frequently to it, consistently uncovering {something