Horror Fiction Stories

In "Long Way Home", a young soldier returns from the Middle East and discovers that there is another - and much stranger - war to be fought in his hometown. In "Mister Pockets" a young paperboy discovers that a random act of kindness may have greater consequences - especially as night falls in Pine Deep.

Everyone has had a nightmare at one point of their life. But what if that nightmare was crouched next to your bed watching you sleep? A figure so terrifyingly darker than the unlit surroundings of your room. Some places contain secrets, others are local lore, but some have unimaginable truth behind the stories that echo throughout the world from their walls.

Midnight. Some call it the witching hour. Others call it the devil’s hour. Here in the graveyard, midnight is a very special time. It is a time when ghostly spirits are at their strongest, when the veil between our world and theirs is at its thinnest. Legend has it, that while most of the world is asleep, the lack of prayers allow the spirits to communicate under the cover of darkness, among the headstones, their whispers rustling in the leaves of the old oak trees. But if you’re here in the graveyard, you can tell yourself it’s just the wind....

A woman must learn to take life by the throat after a night out leads to irrevocable changes in this juicy, thrilling novel from the USA Today bestselling author of Such Sharp Teeth and Black Sheep. Sloane Parker is dreading her birthday. She doesn’t need a reminder she’s getting older, or...

Brian Evenson's fifth story collection constructs a human landscape as unearthly as it is mundane. Replete with the brutality, primordial waste, and savage blankness familiar to listeners of his earlier works, Evenson's Kafkaesque allegories entice the mind while stubbornly disordering it.

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.

In this collection of classic ghost stories from Japan, beautiful princesses turn out to be frogs, paintings come alive, deadly spectral brides haunt the living and a samurai delivers the baby of a Shinto goddess with mystical help. Here are all the phantoms and ghouls of Japanese folklore: 'rokuro-kubi', whose heads separate from their bodies at night; 'jikininki', or flesh-eating goblins; and terrifying faceless 'mujina' who haunt lonely neighbourhoods.

Make Pretend is the first book in a series collecting all of Armand Rosamilia's short fiction. Twenty-one tales ranging from horror to crime thriller to science fiction, contemporary fiction to fantasy and more. From stories a few days ago to one 40 years old.

I wasn't always like this, you know - paranoid, temperamental, vindictive. I mean, sure, I've always been a bit....high strung. But, I never used to stalk my therapist patients. Or yell at them. Or hold them captive in my garage. No, all of that started after the incidents at Lonesome Woods Boarding School. And I'm not talking about the school shooter. This was something far more insidious - something....infectious. Like a cancerous disease that tore through the student body, rotting young hearts one by one.

Fifteen-year-old Bren doesn’t scare easily, especially since her father left, making her head of the house. So when a group of kids dare each other to pass through a tunnel rumored to be haunted by a train that steals people away to "the Nevermore," Bren steps up. But when she reaches the other end of the tunnel, more than she bargained for awaits. For fans of “kids on bikes” ‘80s-style horror.

Sensing his mother’s failing health, a struggling teenager pours out his worries in a letter and drops it through the mail slot of an abandoned show house. He’s surprised when a response arrives, promising good fortune for the price of just one name: someone he hates. He’d give anything for his mother. But the true cost may be more than he’s willing to pay.

Twenty-one tales ranging from horror to crime thriller, to science fiction, contemporary fiction to fantasy, and more. From stories a few days ago, to ones over 30 years old. All Hell Breaks Loose is the second book in a series collecting all of Armand Rosamilia's short fiction.

In this electric horror novel from the author of The Insatiable Volt Sisters, an exhausted mother thinks her newborn might be a monster. She’s right. Thea’s third pregnancy was her easiest. She wasn’t consumed with anxiety about the baby. She wasn’t convinced it was going to be born...

This stunning anthology of classic colonial suspense fiction plunges deep into the native soil from which American horror literature first sprang. While European writers of the Gothic and bizarre evoked ruined castles and crumbling abbeys, their American counterparts looked back to the colonial era’s stifling religion, and its dark and threatening woods.

The story tells the tale of an introverted academic who happens upon a strange whistle while exploring a cemetery on the East Anglian coast. When blown, the whistle unleashes a supernatural force that terrorises its discoverer. Montague Rhodes James was a noted British mediaeval scholar and provost of King's College, Cambridge (1905–1918) and of Eton College (1918–1936). He is best remembered for his ghost stories which are widely regarded as among the finest in English literature.

Now a major motion picture, Stephen King's brilliant and terrifying story of a marriage with truly deadly secrets. Darcy Anderson’s husband of more than twenty years is away on one of his routine business trips when the unsuspecting Darcy looks for batteries in the garage. Her toe knocks up...

“Portis House emerged from the fog as we approached, showing itself slowly as a long, low shadow....” In 1919, Kitty Weekes, pretty, resourceful, and on the run, falsifies her background to obtain a nursing position at Portis House, a remote hospital for soldiers left shell-shocked by the...

Christian Wallis, whose popular tales on Reddit’s NoSleep are spoken of in hushed tones, invites you into a world where the unseen has teeth. Stare into its terrifying maw and you’ll see… A family fun center hides a bottomless pit where reality breaks down and a dark secret awaits. A man’s strange task of painting a wall in the desert leads to something that lurks beyond human perception. A couple’s night out becomes a nightmare where humanity fades and dolls take over. At a black site, the pursuit of forbidden knowledge breaks down the line between science and blasphemy. Prepare yourself.

Andrew Sachs reads these four classic stories of suspense - "The Signalman" by Charles Dickens, "The Haunted Doll's House" by M. R. James, "The Room in the Tower" by E. F. Benson, and "The Bus-Conductor" by E. F. Benson. These spine-tingling tales, from the golden age of the ghost story, are sure to leave you with a creeping sense of dread.

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 GILLER PRIZE Amanda Leduc’s dazzling new novel follows two walking, talking hyenas as they interact with humans over decades. Blurring the line between human and animal, these strange messengers reveal what is possible when the cages that contain us are broken. In...