From The Wicker Man to Ghostwatch, I’ve always been a fan of scary screen shenanigans but I’ve never really embraced literary horror very much. So this October I set myself the challenge of reading fifty ‘classic’ short stories that would be perfect for Halloween; from pioneering gothic to Edwardian ghost stories via body horror and tales of the weird and uncanny where the flesh and blood humans could be creepier than any half-glimpsed spectre. This is my ranking of what I read (one story per author); none of them were terrible and some were masterpieces. I hope they give you some spooky inspiration for All Hallows’ Eve.
50. All Hallows by Walter de la Mare (1926)
A disturbed verger takes a credulous tourist on a twilight tour of a haunted cathedral in a spooky story long on atmosphere but almost entirely devoid of incident.
49. The Tapestried Chamber by Sir Walter Scott (1828)
One of the building blocks of the modern ghost story so we’ll forgive this slice of haunted castle fun its perfunctory plotting.
48. Green Tea by Sheridan le Fanu (1872)
Le Fanu’s best known work aside from proto-vampire novella Carmilla is a curious - and florid - tale of a vicar besieged by visions of a demonic monkey after quaffing the titular beverage.
47. Sredni Vashtar by Saki (1912)
Written with Saki’s customary caustic humour this cautionary tale of an overbearing guardian and an improbably monikered ferret-god is a deliciously dark if lightweight treat.
46. The Horla by Guy de Maupassant (1887)
De Maupassant’s short stories are seriously short and this Lovecraft-influencing fragment about a man driven insane by an invisible being would have benefited from being fleshed out a little.
45. Afterward by Edith Wharton (1910)
Infused with an ironic humour and knowing dialogue, Wharton’s yarn of haunted houses and spectres that you only recognise as such after the fact is a little too predictable to truly satisfy.
44. The Red Room by HG Wells (1896)
The sci fi pioneer’s horror stories are unjustly neglected and this sly psychological chiller about a hubristic chap keeping a vigil in a haunted room plays expertly on the reader’s fear of the dark.
43. The Brood by Ramsey Campbell (1980)
Local eccentrics start disappearing and something seriously icky is growing in the basement in this garish slab of urban horror from one of the genre’s biggest modern names.
42. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving (1820)
Prime fare for strong film and theatre adaptations, Irving’s hugely influential headless horseman tale allows the vivid imagery of its gothic conceit to get a bit too bogged down in overly descriptive prose.
41. At the End of the Passage by Rudyard Kipling (1919)
If you can get past the wince-inducing racial stereotypes and stock characterisation, Kipling’s oppressive story of madness and insomnia in the Raj has a memorably disquieting conclusion.
40. Smoke Ghost by Fritz Leiber (1941)
A shape-shifting black creature crawls out of the polluted sprawl of Chicago in this slight yet creepy tale that proved pivotal to the development of urban horror.
39. The Old Nurse’s Story by Elizabeth Gaskell (1852)
A ghostly child stalks the Northumberland moors, revealing a dreadful family secret into the bargain. Highly influential and deftly written, even if its scares have not aged brilliantly.
38. Bloodchild by Octavia E Butler (1995)
Frequently (although erroneously according to its author) read as an allegory for slavery, Butler’s queasy body horror imagines a world where wormlike creatures impregnate human males with often lethal results.
37. The Captain of the Polestar by Arthur Conan Doyle (1883)
Elegantly penned and possessed of a dark romanticism, this maritime ghost story by the creator of Sherlock Holmes centres on the eponymous vessel, its frighteningly unpredictable captain and a strange white shape drifting across the ice.
36. Rooum by Oliver Onions (1911)
Charmingly devoid of big scares, Onions’ yarn builds dread and suspense in subtle ways as an engineer desperately tries to outrun the unknown force that pursues him relentlessly.
35. Poor Girl by Elizabeth Taylor (1955)
Elizabeth Taylor’s (not that one) sensual supernatural vignette about a prim governess afflicted by erotically charged premonitions may at first appear inconsequential but its enigmatic message lingers long after the final words have been read.
34. His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood by Poppy Z Brite (1993)
Coming on like an x-rated Vampire Diaries, Brite’s sexually transgressive story of voodoo charms and grave robbing is a seductively visceral and disturbing read.
33. The Romance of Certain Old Clothes by Henry James (1868)
James’ first ghost story is a considerably easier read than the more famous but impossibly dense The Jolly Corner, only revealing its supernatural side at the piece’s chillingly gothic denouement.
32. Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1835)
Another of Hawthorne’s blood and thunder denunciations of Puritanism, the Goodman’s dark progress through a wood full of disguised devils doubles as a genuinely unsettling account of demonic temptation.
31. Thrawn Janet by Robert Louis Stevenson (1881)
Wade through the - at times impenetrable - Scots dialect and here is a chilling depiction of Satanic possession in the Caledonian countryside from the author of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
30. The Monkey’s Paw by WW Jacobs (1902)
A family learn to be very careful about what they wish for in Jacobs’ ghastly inversion of Aladdin as the dessicated paw of the title grants them three life-changing choices.
29. Man-size in Marble by Edith Nesbit (1887)
The beloved children’s author was also a fine writer of ghost stories as this neatly constructed tale of murderous stone soldiers proves - a supreme example of the power of not revealing your monsters.
28. The Small Assassin by Ray Bradbury (1946)
Whilst it may be a bit of a stretch to claim Bradbury’s unnerving account of an evil baby as an allegory of post-natal depression, there is more than enough creeping dread here to overcome its potentially ludicrous premise.
27. Sardonicus by Ray Russell (1961)
Pitch-perfect gothic pastiche from one of horror’s cult heroes, Sardonicus finds an upstanding English physician summoned to the archetypal Bohemian castle to operate on his first love’s hideously disfigured husband.
26. The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe (1843)
For all Poe’s undoubted influence his prose reads like purest melodrama to modern audiences, which is why this brief, almost unbearably intense piece about a killer tormented by his victim’s concealed heart works far better than any of his longer works.
25. The Repairer of Reputations by Robert Chambers (1895)
The opening story in Chambers’ seminal The King in Yellow envisions a nightmarish dystopia full of suicide booths where a mutilated madman plots the coming of a diabolical monarch.
24. I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison (1967)
By some way the bleakest piece in this list, Ellison’s sci-fi parable about all-powerful supercomputers torturing the human race is unrelenting in its meticulously realised sadism.
23. The Willows by Algernon Blackwood (1907)
Blending evocative nature writing with insidious horror, Blackwood’s revered short story charts the progressively more uncanny experiences of two travellers in a remote region of rural Europe. A landmark of weird fiction.
22. The Company of Wolves by Angela Carter (1979)
The novella-length The Bloody Chamber is too long to include here but this twisted take on Red Riding Hood exposes the jet-black heart of traditional fairytales with highly sexualised and exquisitely written aplomb.
21. The Screaming Skull by Francis Marion Crawford (1908)
One of the finest instances of stream-of-consciousness monologue in supernatural fiction, Crawford’s eerie tale of a murdered woman’s skull driving the men responsible for her death to their own hideous fates upped the ante for psychological realism in early twentieth century horror.
20. The Withered Arm by Thomas Hardy (1888)
Arguably the best of all Hardy’s short stories, The Withered Arm sees a jilted lover curse her replacement’s limb with devastating consequences for all involved.
19. In the Penal Colony by Franz Kafka (1919)
The author of The Trial allies petty minded bureaucracy to shocking body horror as a sadistic official demonstrates a hideous torture device to a disbelieving foreign traveller.
18. The Signal-Man by Charles Dickens (1866)
The lion of the epic Victorian novel delivers a subtly spooky vignette about a railway operative plagued by dreadful premonitions that manages to be as quietly moving as it is unsettling.
17. The Sandman by ETA Hoffman (1816)
The oldest story on this list can stand its ground with all that came after; dozens of haunting images are scattered through this nightmarish corruption of the monster of German folk memory.
16. Graveyard Shift by Stephen King (1970)
The modern master of horror is so dizzyingly prolific that choosing one story is inevitably a fool’s errand but this brilliantly paced and gloriously gruesome account of giant rats devouring a motley crew of factory workers is a definite highlight of his debut collection, Night Shift.
15. The White People by Arthur Machen (1899)
Presented as the impetuous ramblings of a young girl being inducted into a shadowy demonic cult, Machen’s hugely influential piece is virtually plotless yet abounds in richly descriptive and all too horribly credible imagery.
14. Hell Screen by Ryunosoke Akutagawa (1918)
Deeply unpleasant in the best way possible, Akutagawa’s vivid story of an eccentric - and sadistic - painter in feudal Japan and the horrific price he is willing to pay for artistic verisimilitude is the very best of Japanese literary horror.
13. Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad by MR James (1904)
Probably the most celebrated of James’ many celebrated pieces, this slice of expertly crafted psychological terror revolves around an academic’s unearthing of a mysterious whistle and the increasingly disturbing events that follow its inadvisable blowing.
12. The Moonlit Road by Ambrose Bierce (1907)
Possibly the most cleverly structured of any of the stories on this list, Bierce’s greatest ghost story is split into three sections each with a different narrator to spin a complex tale of slaughter and haunting where nothing is as it first appears.
11. The Tower by Marghanita Laski (1955)
Maddeningly out of print, this terrifying fragment is built upon a beautifully simple premise; an interminable climb up the steps of a darkened tower and fighting the irresistible urge to throw yourself into oblivion.
10. The Room in the Tower by EF Benson (1912)
An audacious evocation of a recurrent nightmare made real, Benson’s chilling tale stands apart from many of the more genteel ghost stories of the period in its tightly wound menace and omnipotent dread.
9. The Landlady by Roald Dahl (1959)
Short and scalpel sharp, this gleefully grim story of a guest house owner with a penchant for killing and stuffing her young male guests is a deliciously macabre and darkly witty gem.
8. In the Hills, the Cities by Clive Barker (1984)
There are undoubtedly better written pieces further down this list but for sheer demented imagination and set pieces that imprint themselves on the memory, Barker’s horrific slice of weird ritual in the backwoods of Communist Yugoslavia is hard to beat.
7. The Town Manager by Thomas Ligotti (2006)
Arguably the master of modern weird short fiction, Ligotti here crafts a disorientingly Lynchian miniature about an unhinged town boss and the carnivalesque freakishness he unleashes on its mystified residents.
6. Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates (1966)
The only monsters in this tour de force of dialogue and pacing are all too human as a sexual predator and serial killer lures his latest victim away from her home on a hot summer’s day.
5. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892)
Instrumental in the evolution of feminist fiction as well as being a searing treatise on mental illness, Gilman’s masterpiece of confinement and delusion tracks a woman’s all-consuming obsession with the patterns in her wallpaper with breathtaking - and deeply disturbing - realism.
4. The Hospice by Robert Aickman (1975)
Nobody wrote ‘strange stories’ like Aickman and this account of a weary traveller’s enforced overnight stay in the creepiest guest house ever is a master class in uncanny set pieces and cryptic allusions that lodge themselves in the reader’s brain.
3. The Dunwich Horror by HP Lovecraft (1929)
As repellent an individual as Lovecraft was, his importance to horror literature is impossible to overstate and The Dunwich Horror - a multifaceted account of an otherworldly attack on a backward Massachusetts town and the sinister events leading up to it - creates an entirely - and horrifyingly - convincing world of supernatural terror in a few pages.
2. The Lottery by Shirley Jackson (1948)
This iconic tale is one of the most esteemed American short stories for good reason; a seemingly quaint small town ritual suffused with homely, colourful detail is transformed into a stomach-churning atrocity by an author uniquely skilled in devising exquisitely terrifying fiction.
1. Don’t Look Now by Daphne du Maurier (1971)
A perfectly crafted short story. A couple holiday in Venice to try and come to terms with their daughter’s tragic death but an omnipresent psychic and a serial killer in the shadows conspire to turn the trip into a waking nightmare. The scares are real and the atmosphere impeccable but this is also a meditation on grief, relationships and the desperation of futile hope that elevates a humble ghost story into a work of art.
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