The Summer People by a master of suspense
I read this tale years ago and it has haunted me from that moment. The titular seasonal visitors are the Allisons from the city, who rent the same remote country cottage each year. During this visit, instead of heading back to urban life, they decide to extend their stay a few more weeks – an action that appears to unsettle everyone in the nearby town. All pass on an identical cryptic advice that nobody has remained in the area after the end of summer. Nonetheless, they are resolved to remain, and at that point things start to become stranger. The individual who supplies oil refuses to sell for them. Nobody is willing to supply supplies to the cabin, and at the time the family endeavor to drive into town, the car won’t start. Bad weather approaches, the power within the device die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the two old people clung to each other in their summer cottage and waited”. What are this couple anticipating? What might the townspeople know? Each occasion I read the writer’s disturbing and inspiring story, I’m reminded that the best horror comes from what’s left undisclosed.
Ringing the Changes from Robert Aickman
In this short story two people travel to a common seaside town where bells ring the whole time, an incessant ringing that is annoying and inexplicable. The initial truly frightening scene takes place after dark, when they decide to go for a stroll and they are unable to locate the water. There’s sand, the scent exists of decaying seafood and salt, waves crash, but the water seems phantom, or something else and even more alarming. It is truly deeply malevolent and each occasion I travel to the shore in the evening I remember this tale which spoiled the beach in the evening for me – favorably.
The young couple – the wife is youthful, he’s not – head back to the hotel and learn why the bells ring, through an extended episode of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and mortality and youth meets danse macabre chaos. It is a disturbing meditation regarding craving and decay, a pair of individuals maturing in tandem as a couple, the attachment and aggression and tenderness in matrimony.
Not just the most terrifying, but probably among the finest brief tales out there, and a beloved choice. I encountered it in Spanish, in the first edition of this author’s works to be released in this country a decade ago.
A Dark Novel from an esteemed writer
I delved into this book near the water in France recently. Even with the bright weather I felt cold creep through me. I also felt the thrill of excitement. I was composing a new project, and I faced a wall. I was uncertain if there was any good way to craft some of the fearful things the narrative involves. Going through this book, I understood that it was possible.
Published in 1995, the novel is a dark flight through the mind of a young serial killer, Quentin P, based on an infamous individual, the criminal who killed and cut apart multiple victims in Milwaukee during a specific period. As is well-known, this person was obsessed with making a compliant victim who would never leave by his side and carried out several macabre trials to achieve this.
The acts the story tells are horrific, but similarly terrifying is its emotional authenticity. The character’s terrible, broken reality is simply narrated with concise language, details omitted. The audience is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, compelled to observe thoughts and actions that horrify. The strangeness of his mind resembles a physical shock – or finding oneself isolated in an empty realm. Entering this story feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are swallowed whole.
A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi
In my early years, I was a somnambulist and later started suffering from bad dreams. Once, the fear involved a vision during which I was trapped in a box and, as I roused, I found that I had removed a piece out of the window frame, trying to get out. That home was falling apart; when storms came the downstairs hall filled with water, insect eggs fell from the ceiling onto the bed, and once a sizeable vermin climbed the drapes in the bedroom.
When a friend handed me this author’s book, I had moved out in my childhood residence, but the narrative of the house located on the coastline seemed recognizable to me, homesick at that time. It is a story featuring a possessed clamorous, emotional house and a female character who ingests chalk from the shoreline. I adored the story deeply and went back repeatedly to its pages, always finding {something
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