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A Renowned Horror Author

A Chilling Tale from a master of suspense

I read this narrative years ago and it has stayed with me ever since. The titular seasonal visitors turn out to be a couple from New York, who rent the same remote rural cabin each year. During this visit, instead of returning home, they decide to prolong their holiday for a month longer – an action that appears to unsettle everyone in the nearby town. All pass on an identical cryptic advice that not a soul has lingered at the lake beyond the end of summer. Regardless, the Allisons are determined to remain, and at that point things start to get increasingly weird. The individual who delivers the kerosene refuses to sell to the couple. Not a single person will deliver groceries to the cabin, and at the time they endeavor to travel to the community, the car refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the energy within the device diminish, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple clung to each other inside their cabin and anticipated”. What might be they expecting? What could the residents be aware of? Each occasion I revisit Jackson’s chilling and inspiring tale, I recall that the best horror comes from that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman

In this short story a couple journey to a typical seaside town where church bells toll constantly, an incessant ringing that is irritating and unexplainable. The opening extremely terrifying moment happens after dark, as they choose to take a walk and they can’t find the sea. The beach is there, the scent exists of decaying seafood and seawater, there are waves, but the ocean is a ghost, or another thing and even more alarming. It’s just deeply malevolent and every time I go to the coast at night I think about this tale that destroyed the sea at night for me – positively.

The young couple – the wife is youthful, he’s not – head back to the hotel and discover why the bells ring, during a prolonged scene of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden meets danse macabre chaos. It’s an unnerving reflection regarding craving and decay, two people maturing in tandem as spouses, the attachment and aggression and gentleness within wedlock.

Not only the scariest, but likely a top example of short stories out there, and a personal favourite. I encountered it in the Spanish language, in the first edition of Aickman stories to be published in this country a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by Joyce Carol Oates

I read this narrative near the water overseas in 2020. Even with the bright weather I felt a chill within me. Additionally, I sensed the thrill of anticipation. I was working on a new project, and I faced a wall. I didn’t know if it was possible any good way to compose certain terrifying elements the narrative involves. Experiencing this novel, I saw that it was possible.

Published in 1995, the story is a grim journey through the mind of a young serial killer, Quentin P, based on Jeffrey Dahmer, the murderer who slaughtered and mutilated numerous individuals in the Midwest over a decade. Infamously, this person was fixated with producing a compliant victim who would never leave him and attempted numerous macabre trials to accomplish it.

The acts the story tells are appalling, but just as scary is its own mental realism. Quentin P’s terrible, broken reality is directly described with concise language, details omitted. The reader is plunged trapped in his consciousness, compelled to see ideas and deeds that shock. The alien nature of his mind feels like a physical shock – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Entering this book is not just reading and more like a physical journey. You are consumed entirely.

Daisy Johnson

A Haunting Novel from a gifted writer

In my early years, I sleepwalked and subsequently commenced experiencing nightmares. On one occasion, the fear involved a nightmare where I was stuck within an enclosure and, as I roused, I discovered that I had removed the slat from the window, trying to get out. That home was decaying; when storms came the entranceway flooded, maggots fell from the ceiling onto the bed, and on one occasion a sizeable vermin climbed the drapes in that space.

After an acquaintance presented me with the story, I had moved out at my family home, but the story about the home high on the Dover cliffs appeared known in my view, homesick at that time. This is a book concerning a ghostly loud, emotional house and a female character who consumes chalk off the rocks. I cherished the book immensely and went back repeatedly to its pages, each time discovering {something