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A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I read this narrative years ago and it has haunted me since then. The named seasonal visitors turn out to be a family urban dwellers, who rent an identical off-grid country cottage annually. This time, instead of heading back to the city, they decide to prolong their stay a few more weeks – an action that appears to alarm all the locals in the adjacent village. All pass on an identical cryptic advice that no one has remained by the water past Labor Day. Even so, they are resolved to remain, and at that point things start to grow more bizarre. The man who delivers the kerosene won’t sell for them. No one agrees to bring supplies to the cabin, and when the Allisons try to go to the village, the car won’t start. A tempest builds, the energy in the radio die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the aged individuals crowded closely within their rental and waited”. What could be this couple expecting? What might the residents be aware of? Whenever I revisit the writer’s unnerving and thought-provoking story, I’m reminded that the top terror comes from what’s left undisclosed.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes from a noted author

In this concise narrative a couple go to an ordinary beach community in which chimes sound the whole time, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and inexplicable. The first very scary episode occurs at night, at the time they choose to go for a stroll and they can’t find the sea. The beach is there, there is the odor of decaying seafood and salt, surf is audible, but the sea appears spectral, or something else and more dreadful. It is simply insanely sinister and every time I travel to the shore after dark I remember this narrative that ruined the sea at night for me – positively.

The young couple – the woman is adolescent, he’s not – go back to the inn and find out the cause of the ringing, through an extended episode of confinement, necro-orgy and demise and innocence intersects with grim ballet chaos. It’s a chilling meditation regarding craving and decline, a pair of individuals maturing in tandem as a couple, the bond and brutality and gentleness of marriage.

Not only the most terrifying, but probably among the finest concise narratives in existence, and a personal favourite. I experienced it in the Spanish language, in the initial publication of Aickman stories to appear in this country in 2011.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer

I read this narrative by a pool in France a few years ago. Although it was sunny I felt cold creep over me. Additionally, I sensed the thrill of anticipation. I was composing my third novel, and I had hit a wall. I didn’t know whether there existed a proper method to write some of the fearful things the book contains. Reading Zombie, I understood that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the book is a bleak exploration into the thoughts of a young serial killer, Quentin P, modeled after a notorious figure, the serial killer who slaughtered and dismembered 17 young men and boys in Milwaukee during a specific period. As is well-known, this person was obsessed with making a compliant victim who would stay with him and carried out several macabre trials to do so.

The actions the book depicts are horrific, but just as scary is the emotional authenticity. The protagonist’s dreadful, fragmented world is plainly told in spare prose, details omitted. The reader is immersed stuck in his mind, compelled to observe mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The alien nature of his thinking resembles a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated on a desolate planet. Starting this story feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching by a gifted writer

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and eventually began having night terrors. Once, the terror featured a dream during which I was trapped in a box and, when I woke up, I discovered that I had removed the slat from the window, seeking to leave. That home was falling apart; during heavy rain the ground floor corridor filled with water, maggots fell from the ceiling on to my parents’ bed, and once a large rat ascended the window coverings in my sister’s room.

When a friend gave me this author’s book, I had moved out at my family home, but the story about the home high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to me, nostalgic as I felt. It is a novel about a haunted clamorous, sentimental building and a female character who eats chalk off the rocks. I cherished the book deeply and came back again and again to the story, consistently uncovering {something