Horror Fiction Short Stories

City of elegance and squalor. Of religious fervor and wanton lusts. And everywhere, on the walls of courtyards and churches, an incandescent fungus of mysterious and ominous origin. In Ambergris, a would-be suitor discovers that a sunlit street can become a killing ground in the blink of an eye. An artist receives an invitation to a beheading - and finds himself enchanted. And a patient in a mental institution is convinced he has made up a city called Ambergris, imagined its every last detail, and that he’s really from a place called Chicago.

Ghosts, specters, wraiths.... Restless undead spirits wail beneath the full moon and reach out for you from the swirling mists. The pain and loneliness of death drives them to seek the one thing they cannot have - the spark of life within your soul.... Scare Street presents volumes seven through nine of Terror in the Shadows, gathered into one spine-tingling tome. More than 30 stories of supernatural fear and suspense lurk with this macabre collection. Each one packed with a ghoulish assortment of creatures from beyond the grave.

The Perry family's new house is perfect - except for the weird behavior of the neighbors, and that odd smell coming from a dark corner in the basement. Pity no one warned the family about the house. Now it's too late. Because the darkness at the bottom of the basement stairs is rising.

Can you handle this chilling feast of fear...? A romantic getaway turns to a horrific ordeal when evil falls from the stars. A terrified young woman is stalked by a grim specter in the form of man’s best friend. A beleaguered wage slave discovers that playing with toys at work can have deadly consequences.... Scare Street’s team of horror authors brings you 12 delightedly macabre morsels of terror in this new, spine-tingling collection. Indulge yourself in a delicious feast of chilling nightmares and dark fantasies.

In this delightfully chilling collection, the iconic Jeanette Winterson turns her fearless gaze to the realm of ghosts, interspersing her own encounters with the supernatural alongside hair-raising fictions. Lifting the veil between the living and the dead, Winterson spirits us away to a haunted estate that ensnares a nomadic young couple in its own dark past, a staged immersive ghost tour gone awry, a West Village seance that threatens the bounds between AI and reality, and a vacation home in the metaverse where a widow visits an improved version of her deceased husband.

Since the zombie invasion, the island of Manhattan has been turned into a wintery wasteland. The Zombie King has arrived in search of a mythical Opener. A human who can create a bridge to the land of the dead and unleash all its horrors on earth. But, who is the mysterious Giant, and why can no one get onto the island of Manhattan? Then we take a trip to the carnival and learn the origins of the Dead-Killer and why he wants the Zombie King dead forever. And finally, where does the Vamp get her tattoos? And why are they so important?

Robert "Bubba" Brabham never wanted to hunt monsters. He mostly wanted to drink beer, hunt deer, and chase women, like every other giant redneck in the world. But life interfered, and Bubba found himself holster-deep in the family business: monster hunting. Now he's the Southeastern Regional Hunter for the Holy Roman Catholic Church...Bubba has to save the world from the things that go bump in the night! Just as soon as he's done with his beer. And maybe after one more lap dance.

The Books of Blood combine the ordinary with the extraordinary while radiating the eroticism that has become Barker's signature. Weaving tales of the everyday world transformed into an unrecognizable place, where reason no longer exists and logic ceases to explain the workings of the universe, Clive Barker provides the stuff of nightmares in packages too tantalizing to resist.

A chilling collection of psychological suspense and literary horror from the multiple award-winning author of the national best seller The Cabin at the End of the World and A Head Full of Ghosts. A masterful anthology featuring 19 pieces of short fiction, Growing Things and Other Stories is an exciting glimpse into Paul Tremblay’s fantastically fertile imagination.

From Dickens's A Christmas Carol to the ghost stories of M.R. James, the tradition of a haunted tale at Christmas has flourished across the centuries. The twelve stories of The Winter Spirits are all centred around Christmas or Advent, boldly and playfully re-imagining a beloved tradition for a modern audience. Taking you from a haunted Tuscan villa to a remote Scottish island with a dark secret, and drawing inspiration from festive traditions from all around the globe, these vibrant haunted stories are your ultimate companion for frosty nights.

CONTENTS: A Suspicious Gift [Algernon Blackwood], Skeleton Lake: An Episode in Camp [Algernon Blackwood], The Wood of the Dead [Algernon Blackwood], A Baby Tramp [Ambrose Bierce], The Damned Thing [Ambrose Bierce], Dagon [H.P Lovecraft], The Horror of the Heights [Arthur Conan Doyle], The Descendant [H.P Lovecraft], The Cats of Ulthar [H.P Lovecraft], The Evil Clergyman [H.P Lovecraft], He [H.P Lovecraft], The Book [H.P Lovecraft], In the Vault [H.P Lovecraft], Nyarlathotep [H.P Lovecraft], Death and the Woman [Gertrude Atherton], The Striding Place [Gertrude Atherton].

A terrifying new collection of short stories from the master of zombie fiction, Max Brooks, best-selling author of World War Z, The Zombie Survival Guide and Recorded Attacks.

Paris, France, is known as the City of Lights, a metropolis renowned for romance and beauty. Beneath the bustling streets and cafés, however, exists the Catacombs, a labyrinth of crumbling tunnels filled with six million dead. When a video camera containing mysterious footage is discovered deep within their depths, a group of friends venture into the tunnels to investigate. But what starts out as a lighthearted adventure takes a turn for the worse when they reach their destination - and stumble upon the evil lurking there.

A Penguin Classic. First published in 1938, this volume of stories collected with the encouragement of his longtime editor Pascal Covici serves as a wonderful introduction to the work of Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck. Set in the beautiful Salinas Valley of California, where simple people farm the land and struggle to find a place for themselves in the world, these stories reflect Steinbeck’s characteristic interests: The tensions between town and country, laborers and owners, past and present.

Eager fans have been clamoring for an all-in-one collection of #1 bestselling author Sherrilyn Kenyon's hard-to-find short stories. In this collection, Sherrilyn Kenyon takes listeners from the Dark-Hunters to witches to demons and everything in-between as she explores the darkest parts of human nature. Dangerous and exciting, each story is one thrill ride after the next, proving time and again how Sherrilyn has captivated millions worldwide. Now, listeners are invited to go deep into Kenyon's rich and imaginative mind and experience the heart-racing moments that never stop coming!

Jake has nearly everything he wants from life. He has the good looks. He has the money. He has the fame. He has the model wife. He has the booming film career and popularity. The only thing he doesn't seem to have is the luck, and soon he finds himself without arms or legs....

A provocative collection of literary horror stories by one of America’s most acclaimed and inventive writers whose unique prose “can be soul-shaking” (New Yorker).

Perhaps Blackwood's most celebrated story, The Willows was influenced heavily by his own trips down the Danube River. It tells the story of two campers who pick the wrong place to sleep for the night, a place where another dimension impinges on our own. H.P. Lovecraft considered this the finest supernatural tale in English literature.

Theirs was a story of two people from different stations of life - he, poor and she, rich. He worked hard to make a name for himself, and having done so, he returns to her to find out that she had loved him all these years and was waiting for him as well. The poet is so distraught that with it having taken so long for them to be together, it seems even more unfair for them to be separated at the end. Finding out that his love has passed away, he immediately decides to follow after her to the Castle of the King of Death.

"Perfect deadpan marks the opening of Ali Simpson’s The Monster'" writes Susan Merrell of The Southampton Review in her introduction to this issue of Recommended Reading.