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A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I encountered this tale long ago and it has lingered with me from that moment. The titular “summer people” are a family from New York, who occupy an identical off-grid lakeside house each year. This time, rather than heading back home, they choose to lengthen their vacation for a month longer – something that seems to unsettle everyone in the nearby town. Each repeats a similar vague warning that not a soul has remained by the water beyond Labor Day. Even so, the couple are resolved to not leave, and that is the moment situations commence to get increasingly weird. The man who delivers the kerosene refuses to sell to them. Nobody is willing to supply food to the cottage, and when the family endeavor to drive into town, their vehicle refuses to operate. Bad weather approaches, the batteries within the device fade, and when night comes, “the two old people clung to each other within their rental and expected”. What are this couple anticipating? What might the townspeople know? Every time I peruse the writer’s disturbing and influential tale, I remember that the best horror comes from the unspoken.

An Acclaimed Writer

An Eerie Story from a noted author

In this concise narrative two people travel to an ordinary beach community in which chimes sound the whole time, a constant chiming that is irritating and inexplicable. The initial extremely terrifying scene happens during the evening, as they opt to walk around and they can’t find the ocean. Sand is present, there’s the smell of putrid marine life and brine, waves crash, but the water appears spectral, or something else and more dreadful. It’s just deeply malevolent and each occasion I travel to the shore at night I think about this narrative that ruined the beach in the evening in my view – favorably.

The recent spouses – the woman is adolescent, he’s not – head back to the hotel and learn the reason for the chiming, through an extended episode of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and mortality and youth encounters dance of death chaos. It’s a chilling meditation on desire and deterioration, two people maturing in tandem as a couple, the attachment and aggression and gentleness of marriage.

Not merely the most terrifying, but probably among the finest concise narratives in existence, and an individual preference. I experienced it in the Spanish language, in the first edition of this author’s works to be published locally a decade ago.

A Prominent Novelist

A Dark Novel by an esteemed writer

I read Zombie by a pool in France a few years ago. Although it was sunny I sensed an icy feeling through me. I also experienced the electricity of anticipation. I was composing my latest book, and I had hit a wall. I was uncertain if there was an effective approach to write some of the fearful things the narrative involves. Reading Zombie, I saw that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the story is a bleak exploration within the psyche of a criminal, the protagonist, based on an infamous individual, the murderer who killed and dismembered 17 young men and boys in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, the killer was consumed with producing a compliant victim who would stay with him and made many macabre trials to do so.

The deeds the story tells are horrific, but similarly terrifying is the emotional authenticity. Quentin P’s awful, fragmented world is directly described with concise language, details omitted. The audience is plunged caught in his thoughts, forced to witness mental processes and behaviors that appal. The strangeness of his mind feels like a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Entering this story is not just reading but a complete immersion. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel from a gifted writer

In my early years, I walked in my sleep and subsequently commenced experiencing nightmares. On one occasion, the fear involved a vision where I was confined in a box and, as I roused, I found that I had removed a piece from the window, trying to get out. That building was falling apart; when storms came the downstairs hall became inundated, fly larvae dropped from above into the bedroom, and at one time a big rodent climbed the drapes in my sister’s room.

Once a companion gave me Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I had moved out in my childhood residence, but the story of the house located on the coastline appeared known to myself, longing as I was. It is a novel about a haunted loud, atmospheric home and a female character who ingests calcium off the rocks. I cherished the story immensely and went back frequently to its pages, always finding {something