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A Renowned Horror Author

A Chilling Tale from a master of suspense

I encountered this tale years ago and it has stayed with me since then. The so-called seasonal visitors are a family urban dwellers, who lease the same off-grid rural cabin every summer. On this occasion, in place of returning to urban life, they decide to prolong their vacation an extra month – something that seems to unsettle everyone in the adjacent village. Everyone conveys an identical cryptic advice that nobody has lingered in the area past Labor Day. Regardless, the couple are resolved to stay, and that is the moment events begin to become stranger. The man who brings fuel won’t sell for them. No one agrees to bring supplies to the cabin, and as the family endeavor to travel to the community, the car fails to start. A tempest builds, the energy in the radio diminish, and when night comes, “the two old people huddled together in their summer cottage and expected”. What could be this couple expecting? What might the townspeople understand? Each occasion I peruse this author’s chilling and thought-provoking narrative, I remember that the best horror comes from that which remains hidden.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes from a noted author

In this concise narrative two people go to a typical seaside town in which chimes sound the whole time, an incessant ringing that is annoying and puzzling. The first extremely terrifying scene takes place after dark, as they opt to take a walk and they are unable to locate the sea. There’s sand, there is the odor of decaying seafood and brine, surf is audible, but the water seems phantom, or another thing and even more alarming. It is simply profoundly ominous and whenever I go to the coast at night I remember this narrative that destroyed the beach in the evening in my view – in a good way.

The young couple – she’s very young, the husband is older – return to the hotel and learn the reason for the chiming, in a long sequence of enclosed spaces, macabre revelry and mortality and youth intersects with dance of death bedlam. It’s a chilling contemplation on desire and deterioration, two people aging together as partners, the connection and violence and affection of marriage.

Not only the scariest, but likely among the finest brief tales in existence, and a beloved choice. I encountered it in Spanish, in the first edition of Aickman stories to be released in Argentina several years back.

Catriona Ward

A Dark Novel by an esteemed writer

I perused this book near the water in the French countryside in 2020. Even with the bright weather I experienced a chill through me. I also felt the thrill of excitement. I was writing a new project, and I encountered a block. I was uncertain if there was any good way to write some of the fearful things the book contains. Going through this book, I realized that it could be done.

Released decades ago, the story is a grim journey into the thoughts of a young serial killer, the protagonist, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who slaughtered and dismembered multiple victims in the Midwest over a decade. As is well-known, Dahmer was fixated with producing a submissive individual who would never leave him and attempted numerous macabre trials to do so.

The actions the book depicts are horrific, but similarly terrifying is the emotional authenticity. The character’s dreadful, broken reality is plainly told using minimal words, details omitted. The audience is plunged stuck in his mind, forced to observe mental processes and behaviors that appal. The foreignness of his thinking resembles a tangible impact – or getting lost on a barren alien world. Going into this book feels different from reading and more like a physical journey. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel by a gifted writer

In my early years, I walked in my sleep and subsequently commenced suffering from bad dreams. At one point, the fear included a dream in which I was trapped within an enclosure and, as I roused, I discovered that I had removed the slat out of the window frame, seeking to leave. That house was falling apart; when storms came the downstairs hall flooded, insect eggs came down from the roof into the bedroom, and on one occasion a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in the bedroom.

Once a companion handed me this author’s book, I had moved out with my parents, but the story about the home high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar to me, homesick as I was. This is a story featuring a possessed noisy, atmospheric home and a girl who consumes chalk from the shoreline. I loved the book deeply and came back again and again to it, consistently uncovering {something