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A Renowned Horror Author

A Chilling Tale by Shirley Jackson

I read this tale years ago and it has lingered with me from that moment. The titular vacationers turn out to be a couple from the city, who rent a particular remote country cottage annually. During this visit, rather than going back to urban life, they decide to lengthen their stay a few more weeks – an action that appears to disturb each resident in the nearby town. All pass on an identical cryptic advice that not a soul has lingered in the area past Labor Day. Even so, the Allisons are determined to not leave, and that is the moment things start to get increasingly weird. The individual who delivers oil declines to provide for them. Nobody agrees to bring food to their home, and when the Allisons endeavor to go to the village, their vehicle fails to start. A storm gathers, the power in the radio diminish, and as darkness falls, “the two old people crowded closely within their rental and expected”. What are they expecting? What do the townspeople understand? Each occasion I revisit the writer’s unnerving and influential tale, I recall that the best horror stems from the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story from Robert Aickman

In this brief tale two people go to an ordinary beach community where bells ring the whole time, an incessant ringing that is bothersome and inexplicable. The first extremely terrifying scene takes place at night, when they decide to take a walk and they are unable to locate the ocean. There’s sand, there’s the smell of putrid marine life and seawater, there are waves, but the sea is a ghost, or something else and worse. It is simply deeply malevolent and each occasion I go to the coast in the evening I remember this tale that ruined the sea at night for me – favorably.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, the husband is older – return to the hotel and discover the cause of the ringing, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth intersects with dance of death bedlam. It’s a chilling reflection regarding craving and deterioration, two bodies growing old jointly as spouses, the bond and aggression and tenderness in matrimony.

Not just the scariest, but likely among the finest short stories available, and a personal favourite. I experienced it in Spanish, in the initial publication of these tales to appear in this country in 2011.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel by an esteemed writer

I perused Zombie beside the swimming area in France recently. Even with the bright weather I sensed an icy feeling through me. I also experienced the electricity of anticipation. I was working on a new project, and I encountered an obstacle. I wasn’t sure if it was possible an effective approach to write some of the fearful things the story includes. Going through this book, I realized that it was possible.

Released decades ago, the story is a bleak exploration within the psyche of a criminal, Quentin P, modeled after an infamous individual, the serial killer who slaughtered and cut apart 17 young men and boys in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, the killer was fixated with producing a compliant victim who would stay by his side and attempted numerous macabre trials to accomplish it.

The deeds the novel describes are appalling, but just as scary is its mental realism. Quentin P’s dreadful, broken reality is simply narrated using minimal words, details omitted. You is plunged stuck in his mind, obliged to observe mental processes and behaviors that horrify. The foreignness of his psyche feels like a bodily jolt – or being stranded in an empty realm. Entering Zombie is less like reading and more like a physical journey. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching from Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I sleepwalked and eventually began experiencing nightmares. Once, the horror included a nightmare during which I was stuck in a box and, when I woke up, I realized that I had ripped the slat from the window, trying to get out. That house was decaying; during heavy rain the downstairs hall became inundated, maggots fell from the ceiling onto the bed, and on one occasion a large rat scaled the curtains in that space.

When a friend gave me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was no longer living in my childhood residence, but the narrative about the home located on the coastline appeared known in my view, longing as I was. This is a story concerning a ghostly clamorous, emotional house and a girl who eats limestone off the rocks. I adored the book deeply and went back repeatedly to its pages, each time discovering {something