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A Renowned Horror Author

A Chilling Tale from a master of suspense

I encountered this story some time back and it has haunted me ever since. The titular seasonal visitors happen to be a family from New York, who rent a particular remote country cottage each year. During this visit, in place of going back to the city, they choose to prolong their vacation for a month longer – something that seems to disturb everyone in the adjacent village. All pass on the same veiled caution that not a soul has lingered at the lake past Labor Day. Even so, they are resolved to stay, and at that point events begin to get increasingly weird. The man who delivers oil refuses to sell to them. No one will deliver supplies to the cabin, and when the Allisons attempt to drive into town, their vehicle fails to start. A tempest builds, the energy of their radio diminish, and as darkness falls, “the elderly couple huddled together inside their cabin and anticipated”. What could be the Allisons expecting? What might the locals understand? Every time I read this author’s chilling and influential narrative, I recall that the finest fright comes from the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes from a noted author

In this brief tale a couple go to an ordinary coastal village where bells ring the whole time, a perpetual pealing that is annoying and puzzling. The opening very scary scene takes place during the evening, as they decide to take a walk and they fail to see the ocean. There’s sand, there is the odor of putrid marine life and seawater, surf is audible, but the ocean is a ghost, or something else and more dreadful. It is truly deeply malevolent and whenever I travel to a beach at night I remember this narrative which spoiled the ocean after dark to my mind – in a good way.

The young couple – she’s very young, the husband is older – head back to their lodging and discover the cause of the ringing, during a prolonged scene of confinement, gruesome festivities and mortality and youth meets grim ballet pandemonium. It’s a chilling contemplation regarding craving and decline, a pair of individuals maturing in tandem as partners, the connection and brutality and tenderness in matrimony.

Not just the most frightening, but perhaps among the finest brief tales in existence, and a beloved choice. I experienced it in Spanish, in the initial publication of these tales to appear in Argentina in 2011.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel from Joyce Carol Oates

I perused Zombie by a pool in the French countryside a few years ago. Even with the bright weather I experienced an icy feeling through me. I also experienced the excitement of anticipation. I was composing my latest book, and I had hit a block. I didn’t know if there was any good way to write certain terrifying elements the book contains. Reading Zombie, I understood that it could be done.

Released decades ago, the book is a grim journey within the psyche of a murderer, Quentin P, based on an infamous individual, the murderer who slaughtered and dismembered multiple victims in the Midwest over a decade. As is well-known, this person was obsessed with creating a zombie sex slave that would remain by his side and made many horrific efforts to do so.

The actions the novel describes are horrific, but just as scary is its psychological persuasiveness. The character’s terrible, broken reality is simply narrated in spare prose, details omitted. You is sunk deep stuck in his mind, compelled to see thoughts and actions that shock. The foreignness of his thinking is like a bodily jolt – or being stranded on a barren alien world. Entering Zombie is not just reading but a complete immersion. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel by a gifted writer

When I was a child, I was a somnambulist and later started suffering from bad dreams. At one point, the fear involved a vision where I was trapped within an enclosure and, when I woke up, I realized that I had ripped the slat from the window, trying to get out. That house was crumbling; when storms came the ground floor corridor became inundated, insect eggs dropped from above into the bedroom, and on one occasion a big rodent ascended the window coverings in my sister’s room.

When a friend presented me with this author’s book, I had moved out at my family home, but the story about the home perched on the cliffs felt familiar to myself, homesick at that time. It is a novel concerning a ghostly loud, sentimental building and a female character who consumes limestone off the rocks. I cherished the book so much and came back again and again to it, each time discovering {something