Favorite Horror Short Stories

[Khephra]

Rawhead Rex - Clive Barker

[NewHampshireDem]

1. I have no mouth & I must scream ...

Though just about anything by Barker is a close second ... I really wish he would give up fantasy and write another book as good as "Damnation Game."

[Khephra]

2. Weaveworld is my fave

[NewHampshireDem]

5. Yeah ... Weaveworld was good, but

only because it was transitional ... it had enough horror in it to make it enjoyable ... unlike "The Great and Secret Show" which was sadly the beginning of the end.

[Interrobang]

20. An excellent choice!

If we're going to go with Harlan Ellison stories, I'd have to also nominate "Croatoan" and "Mefisto In Onyx."

Doesn't anyone here read Stephen King, by the way?! Come on, guys, "The Mangler" and "1408" are excellent. (Also --shudder-- "That Feeling You Can Only Say What It Is In French" from _Everything's Eventual_ as well.)

(I think "1408" is one of the scariest things he's written -- he seems to have a knack for hotel stories!)

"Emerald City Blues" by Stephen R. Boyett is another one of my favourites.

I could go on all night. I have an entire bookcase full of horror-genre books!

[DerekG]

30. "Croatoan" by Harlan Ellison...

One of the creepiest stories ever written. While the writer is certainly a proud progressive (read his rants on Nixon and Reagan some time), his story managed to piss off the more ardent pro-choicers in America. You might never think of a fetus the same way again...trust me.

[Interrobang]

36. Better yet...

"Croatoan" also managed to piss off a lot of the ardent anti-abortionists, too. Uncle Harlan's got a knack for that sort of thing.

[Enraged_Ape]

28. Damn. Beat me to it. Scariest. Story. EVER.

And every day, I think we're getting closer to creating a real AM.

[MrSlayer]

3. The Cask of Amontillado

Not gore horror but a real creeping type of horror. Poe was awesome.

[Jack Rabbit]

4. Poe: The Masque of the Red Death

When I think of it now, the Frat Boy is cast in the part of Prospero.

[ChavezSpeakstheTruth]

21. Can't you see condi in the purple room?

brazier burning - masquerade whirling and the clock about to strike?


ha HA!

[solinvictus]

6. "Sticks"

By Karl Wagner. If you read that story, you can see where "The Blair Witch Project" got much of its inspiration.

[lucidmadman]

13. STICKS is gooood!!!!!!!!!!!!!

There's another K.E Wagner called .220 SWIFT that's really bitchin' too. Creeping around in caves is inherently scary to me...

[solinvictus]

24. Especially carrying a .220 Swift!

If you had to fire the thing, the high velocity round would ricochet all over! Yep, I bought an old short story anthology and "Sticks" wound up being my favorite in the book.

[Feanorcurufinwe]

35. You beat me to it... ... Karl Edward Wagner’s ‘Sticks’

[NewHampshireDem]

7. Sorry to throw in a novel, but I gotta ask ..

House of Blue Leaves ... anyone else read it?

I thought it was the scariest thing I ever read ... idea-wise it was kind of like the book version of the Blair Witch Project.

[Dogmudgeon]

8. The Cold Equations

Tom Godwin; mid-1950s.

An astronaut in a cramped, high-speed spacecraft, delivering serum to an isolated colony, discovers he has a stowaway, a 16-year-old girl who wants to see her brother who's on the colony. With her additional weight, the delivery will never make it in time, dooming the colonists to death. But he could chuck her out of the spacecraft ...

It was much more horror than sci-fi.

--bkl

[NewHampshireDem]

9. They made a Twilight Zone episode out of that ...

mid-80's version of the show, I believe, when it was on NBC?

[Dogmudgeon]

10. I never saw it

I think that the Sci-Fi Channel also made a movie from it.

It was probably the first piece of literature that made me feel total, unfathomable despair. Even worse than Charlotte's Web, the one book I hold responsible for the entire modern SSRI epidemic.

The Passion? No fair. Jesus got to rise from the dead. And who's going to write Marilyn Cross, Superstar, anyway?

--bkl

[lucidmadman]

11. Three off the top of my head...

...
THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS-Lovecraft
BADLANDS-John Metcalfe
THE MAINZ SALTER-Jean Ray

OK four....

THE GREAT GOD PAN-Arthur Machen

I better stop. I LOVE supernatural horror stories and have read hundreds of them....

[DemoTex]

12. I have to go with the only novel (short) written by E.A. Poe.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.

[WannaJumpMyScooter]

14. Any of the several Poe ones do it for me.

Telltale Heart
The Cask of Amontillio
Mask of the Red Death
The Raven
and others I am forgetting at the moment.

[Gildor Inglorion]

15. "The Wendigo"

by Algernon Blackwood. It's nothing like the cheesy movie by the same name made recently. If you've ever been camping WAY out in the woods, this story will scare you to death!

[mac1000a]

16. The Colour Out of Space

by H.P. Lovecraft. Or virtually anything by Lovecraft for that matter.

[Gildor Inglorion]

17. Oooh, yeah...."Dreams in the Witch House"

Horrifying!

[hyphenate]

18. That's an easy one:

almost anything by M.R. James. But there's one particularly creepy one called "O Whistle and I’ll Come to Ye, My Lad" which is probably more scary than anything that King, Koontz or any one of a dozen contemporary writers could do. It was written over 140 years ago (James was in the Victorian age) and therefore had a major headstart on a lot of horror/ghost story authors. He was a peer of Edgar Allen Poe, for example, and they both wrote some rather gothic tales. Of course Poe is more famous, but I betcha that if some of you start reading some of the old horror authors, you will feel far more superstitious than you feel from reading King or any of these guys who have to put everything in gory details. The old authors didn't have to do that to elicit a scare out of people.

[lucidmadman]

23. M.R. James lived between 1862-1936..

...The book which contained the story you mention came out in 1903. Just thought you'd like to know...

[hyphenate]

29. Thank you for that

info. I realize now I was thinking of some others who WERE contemporaries--a friend and I had had a long discussion about Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce, so I likely confused the authors.

[oneighty]

26. There! You have it!

180

[Tom Kitten]

19. The Rats in the Walls ...

by Lovecraft...that one was especially creepy, non Cthulhu related horror story...

Although not asked of here, "the Haunting" by Shirley Jackson raised the hairs on my body like nothing else...Read it straight through in several hours, until 2 am...when my cat scratched at the door to be let in towards the end my heart jumped out and bounced off the ceiling!

[ChavezSpeakstheTruth]

22. HP Lovecraft - call of Ktulu (n/t)

[Elidor]

25. Cask. Of. Amontillado.

It will never be topped. Eloquent, concise, stunning and matter-of-fact. The narrator is insane, and his madness is presented in all its hysteria as though he were having someone over for tea. And then the final boast:

In Pace Requiescat!
Poe is the Master.

[ChavezSpeakstheTruth]

27. I prefer the Black Cat

Just sayin'

[Jack Rabbit]

33. You know your Poe

"The Black Cat" isn't his best-known story, but I like it better than either "The Pit and the Pendulum" or "The Tell-Tale Heart".

For the benefit of the unitiated, please click here.

[ChavezSpeakstheTruth]

37. Poe is a tragic American figure that I can relate to - Annabelle Lee!

One of the most haunting poems I know of!

[DerekG]

31. "A Good Man is Hard to Find"....

Flannery O'Connor's masterwork of terror--the literary equivalent to Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in its rendering of human cruelty. There is a moment in the story when you know the author is going to go ALL THE WAY, and it will haunt you for years.

[drumwolf]

34. which particular moment are you talking about? i read that story too.

n/t

[gpandas]

32. anything by h.p. lovecraft nt

[Bride of Cthulhu]

38. Lovecraft of course.

call of Cthulhu and shadow over innsmuth.