Best horror short stories.

you probably already know this but most of Stephen King's best writing is his short stories. almost all of them are fantastic

He wrote all of them while on an insane amount of cocaine. Just a fun fact.

All the best ones I've read are by Robert Aickman. His stories are almost always inexplicable--you always feel unsettled, and you know something horrible and supernatural has happened, but often you're not exactly sure what.

My favorites:

"Ringing the Changes" (his most famous story)

"The Inner Room"

"The Trains"

"The Hospice"

"In the Woods"

"The Stains"

Ron Hansen has some good ones in his collection of short stories, Nebraska and She Loves Me Not. Really underrated writer. Here is one about a soldier in Vietnam -- Boogeyman

[quote] [italic]The Lottery[/italic] by Shirley Jackson

I'm not a big Stephen King fan, but I agree with R1. "Survivor Type" and "The Jaunt" are unforgettable.

Coup de Grace by Ambrose Bierce and The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe.

I second Shirley Jackson—any short stories. She has a knack for writing about evil hidden behind banal situations.

Speaking of October, "October Country" is a short story collection by Ray Bradbury, which includes "Something Wicked This Way Comes."

Very well written and entertainingly spooky.

I thought "Something Wicked this Way Comes" was a novel.

Any within Books of Blood, by Clive Barker -“In the Hills, the Cities“ helped me understand a little bit of the Sturgis covid rally.

I’m fighting the urge to jump into novels. Damnation Game also by CB was fun and relatively short

I'm a fan of the Victorian writers. I've enjoyed Sheridan Le Fanu's stories.

Watch the old tv show The Night Gallery. "Sins of the Father" will chill your bones.

Got a long list here, collected over the years:

The Devil and Daniel Webster - Stephen Vincent Benet

The Emissary - Ray Bradbury

The Mine - L.T.C. Holt

Three Miles Up - Elizabeth Jane Howard

The Next in Line - Ray Bradbury

The Thing in the Cellar - David H. Keller

Count Szolnok"s Robots - D. Scott-Moncrieff

Among the Wolves - David Case

The Gates Were Locked - Morag Greer

The Labyrinth - R. Chetwynd-Hayes

The Children of Noah - Richard Matheson

No One Ever Comes Here in Winter - James Turner

Marmalade Wine - Joan Aiken

The Interlopers - Saki

The Roll-Call of the Reef - Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch

The Wolves of Cernogratz - Saki

The Wendigo - Algernon Blackwood

Man-Size, in Marble - Edith Nesbit

Celui-La - Eleanor Scott

Blindman's Bluff - Cannot remember the author

A Good Man Is Hard to Find - Flannery O'Connor

R15 Flannery O’Connor wrote crazy short stories—just utterly bizarre. I read some early in college and I’m sure any symbolism probably went over my head at the time, but I recall that they were just f’ed up.

"Miss Mack" by Michael McDowell. One of my all time favorite horror stories.

I love The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins

The Landlady by Roald Dahl. Dahl was a pervert in real life though.

His Beautiful Hands by Oscar Cook

Feet Foremost by L.P Hartley

Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad by M. R. James

The Whole Town's Sleeping by Ray Brabury

Don't Look Now by Daphne DuMaurier

Afterward by Edith Wharton

R3, the only one of that group I've read is 'The Hospice.' Very odd, and deeply unsettling. The way the story went, I was quite surprised to see our protagonist permitted to leave; the situation seemed very 'Hotel California' to me.

𝐒𝐫𝐞𝐝𝐧𝐢 𝐕𝐚𝐬𝐡𝐭𝐚𝐫 by Saki (H.H. Munroe):

𝐖𝐨𝐥𝐟'𝐬 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐭𝐞 𝐁𝐨𝐨𝐤 𝐨𝐟 𝐓𝐞𝐫𝐫𝐨𝐫 by Leonard Wolf (hardback, 1979, used; there is also a paperback version that is still in print, but it's grievously abridged) has a terrific selection of short horror stories, many of the them off the beaten track. I recommend it highly. Here's its Table of Contents:

R22, I loved that one! Forgot about it, haven't read it for a few years. And for that matter, another of Saki's stories, "The Open Window," is also one of my favorites. (Sredni Vashtar used to be my "name" on another message board a very long time ago.)

It wasn't IMDb, was it, R24? ;)

R25 No, it was an RPG gaming board, long dead. Just found a hardcover copy of "Wolf's Complete Book of Terror" online, first edition "near fine" condition. Am buying it, as we speak.

The Room in the Tower by E.F. Benson

[quote]A Good Man Is Hard to Find - Flannery O'Connor

A Hard Man Is Good To Find

DISQUIET by Julia Leigh is more of a novel, but only about 100 pages. It lives up to the name. Over a decade since I read it, I still remember some of the disturbing sequences.

I’m a Stephen King fan, and I like Night Shift a lot, but I liked Different Seasons and. Just After Sunset more.

I’m going to buy that Wolf’s Book as well.

Just about anything by Richard Matheson. His work was amazing. His short story "Prey" was the basis for the "Trilogy of Terror" tv movie segment where Karen Black is getting chased around her apartment by a bloodthirsty Zuni fetish doll with a knife. The wrote the screenplay for "The Night Stalker" tv movie with Darren McGavin, which was the highest rated tv movie up to that time. Stephen King ripped off his story "The Distributor" for his novel "Needful Things." Matheson was truly a master of horror.

Penthouse Forum

The Art of the Deal by Donald Trump

[quote]His short story "Prey" was the basis for the "Trilogy of Terror" tv movie segment where Karen Black is getting chased around her apartment by a bloodthirsty Zuni fetish doll with a knife.

R31, here's a gay parody of that 'Trilogy of Terror' segment, called 𝐊𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐧 𝐁𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐋𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐌𝐞 (1997):

Aww, OP. I bought the Night Shift paperback when I was 9 and read it over one rainy weekend. I remember thunder making me jump!

The details were incredible, like the man walking the around his building’s ledge while birds peck at his ankles.

I can buy King speeding his tits off with stories like The Lawnmower Man.

No one has mentioned Edgar Allan Poe yet? The Mask of Red Death is divine, if I recall the name correctly. Any of his stuff fits the genre.

All of M. R. James' stories are terrifying.

I recommend Thomas Ligotti, whose short works are profoundly disturbing.

Robert W. Chambers' "King in Yellow" series is wonderful.

H.P. Lovecraft's "Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, while a novella, is fascinating.

Henry James' "The Ghostly Rental" is a great psychological study.

Ramsey Campbell's short works are almost as terrifying as M. R. James.

Angela Carter's "Company of Wolves" cycle is excellent.

John Dickson Carr's short stories are mysteries, but often contain a horrific element. A few of them have frightened me more than any ghost story.

R14, "Blindman's Buff", which is terrifying, was by the British author H. Russell Wakefield, also responsible for "The Red Lodge" which reduced the 10-year-old me to a whimpering heap of sobby blubber.

"A Sad Last Love at the Diner of the Damned" by Edward Bryant is really something. Splatterpunk at its best.

"I have no mouth and i must scream" by Harlan Ellison is one of the most famous horror short stories ever written, deservingly so.

And i loved "The Emperor's old bones" by Gemma Files. You can find it online. Horrific, unsettling, really hard to forget.

"The Doll" by Algernon Blackwood

Kafka's In the Penal Colony was pretty disturbing.

Thomas Ligotti! It's been a few years, but I used to love reading his stories around Halloween.

This one was from a book in my youth called “𝗜𝗻 𝗔 𝗗𝗮𝗿𝗸 𝗗𝗮𝗿𝗸 𝗥𝗼𝗼𝗺 & 𝗖𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗼𝗳 𝗢𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝗚𝗵𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝗦𝘁𝗼𝗿𝗶𝗲𝘀” This particular story was called “𝒯𝒽𝑒 𝒢𝓇𝑒𝑒𝓃 𝑅𝒾𝒷𝒷𝑜𝓃”

R43, that story first cropped up in a very unfunny version, as "The Adventure of the German Student" by Washington Irving (1824). The implications of Irving's tale are incredibly ugly. It appears to have been inspired by an urban legend dating to the Reign of Terror.

If you want to read The Adventure of the German Student, here's a link

Miriam, by Truman Capote.

Thank you so much my DL family. Writing down all the authors that you have suggested. I'll have some good reading for October. 🎃🎃🎃

R46, Miriam is a wonderful story and I also loved "The Headless Hawk," "Mr. Misery" and "The Tree of Night".

A lot of Flannery O'Connor stories, while not exactly "horror stories", are pretty horrible. "The Lame Shall Enter First", "A View of the Woods" and "Everything That Rises Must Converge" come to mind.

R26 and R30, tell me what you think of that book once you've gotten it and have looked it over. ;)

I can't get through a Clive Barker novel. I've tried but I think he's boring. Stephen King has knack of being creepy and funny at the same time.

There's one King story that's haunted me for awhile and it's from his collection called Everything's Eventual and I think it's called The Man in Black which is about a creepy man who visits a little boy as he's playing in his yard after his mother has died. The way he describes the man is really haunted and how he reeks of sulfur.

Jerusalem's Lot - with the barefoot boy with ringworm... in a nightgown......

The Boogeyman.

R5 - Another vote for Shirley Jackson's, "The Lottery", utterly chilling in its seamless transformation of the banal into the horrifying.

"Casting the Runes by M.R. James", which became the basis for the film "Curse of the Demon", which became a cult classic on its own later.

And let us not leave out The Great Detective, some of whose cases were genuinely creepy - e.g., "The Speckled Band" and his most famous longer one, "The Hound of the Baskervilles" - the scenes out on the moors are enough to raise the hair on the neck . . .

R26 and R30, what did you think of the book?

There's a collection of short stories called American Noir. They get more horrifying as the book progresses. I sent a copy to my cousin. Neither of us has been able to complete the book.

Is it this one, R57?

The Quiet Boy by Nick Antosca. One of the few short stories I've read in recent years that genuinely scared me. It's being made into a film - Antlers, but the story is terrific.