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A Renowned Horror Author

A Chilling Tale from a master of suspense

I read this tale some time back and it has lingered with me ever since. The named vacationers happen to be a couple from New York, who lease a particular isolated lakeside house each year. During this visit, in place of returning to urban life, they opt to prolong their vacation for a month longer – something that seems to alarm everyone in the surrounding community. Each repeats the same veiled caution that not a soul has ever stayed by the water past the holiday. Regardless, the Allisons are resolved to not leave, and that is the moment things start to get increasingly weird. The person who delivers the kerosene refuses to sell to the couple. Nobody will deliver groceries to the cottage, and at the time they attempt to drive into town, the car fails to start. Bad weather approaches, the power within the device die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the aged individuals huddled together inside their cabin and expected”. What are the Allisons anticipating? What might the residents understand? Each occasion I revisit this author’s unnerving and inspiring story, I’m reminded that the best horror stems from the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story from a noted author

In this short story two people travel to a common beach community where bells ring constantly, an incessant ringing that is bothersome and unexplainable. The first truly frightening scene occurs at night, when they opt to go for a stroll and they fail to see the sea. There’s sand, there’s the smell of rotting fish and brine, waves crash, but the ocean appears spectral, or another thing and worse. It is simply insanely sinister and each occasion I travel to the shore in the evening I think about this tale which spoiled the beach in the evening to my mind – favorably.

The newlyweds – the woman is adolescent, the man is mature – head back to the hotel and discover the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, gruesome festivities and demise and innocence intersects with grim ballet bedlam. It is a disturbing meditation on desire and deterioration, two bodies aging together as spouses, the connection and violence and tenderness within wedlock.

Not just the scariest, but likely one of the best brief tales available, and a personal favourite. I experienced it en español, in the first edition of these tales to be released in this country in 2011.

Catriona Ward

Zombie from Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into this narrative by a pool in the French countryside a few years ago. Even with the bright weather I felt an icy feeling through me. I also felt the thrill of anticipation. I was composing a new project, and I faced a block. I was uncertain whether there existed an effective approach to write some of the fearful things the story includes. Experiencing this novel, I realized that it was possible.

First printed in the nineties, the book is a bleak exploration within the psyche of a murderer, the main character, inspired by a notorious figure, the serial killer who slaughtered and mutilated 17 young men and boys in a city between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, Dahmer was fixated with producing a compliant victim who would never leave with him and attempted numerous grisly attempts to do so.

The deeds the book depicts are appalling, but just as scary is the emotional authenticity. Quentin P’s awful, fragmented world is plainly told using minimal words, details omitted. You is sunk deep stuck in his mind, forced to see thoughts and actions that appal. The alien nature of his mind is like a tangible impact – or being stranded on a barren alien world. Going into this story is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I was a somnambulist and subsequently commenced having night terrors. At one point, the terror involved a vision where I was confined within an enclosure and, when I woke up, I discovered that I had torn off the slat off the window, attempting to escape. That house was falling apart; when it rained heavily the downstairs hall flooded, maggots came down from the roof into the bedroom, and at one time a large rat climbed the drapes in my sister’s room.

Once a companion presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was no longer living at my family home, but the narrative regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs appeared known in my view, homesick as I was. It’s a book concerning a ghostly loud, sentimental building and a young woman who consumes limestone from the cliffs. I adored the novel deeply and returned frequently to its pages, always finding {something