Short Horror

2019. The year certainly made its mark on the world. It also made for a bounty of good horror stories of the extreme kind, the best of which the tales herein serve to illustrate. 2019 was the year Year's Best Hardcore Horror went global. Not by design but because the stories inside just happened to have been written by authors hailing from various parts of the globe. From Australia by way of South Africa, to Italy, Scotland, Norway, Taiwan, North America and India - the common denominator being that their tales come from darkest regions of imagination.

Angela and Terry return home after several grueling months of filming the popular television show, Let's Switch Houses!, only to find their residence in ruin. Sure, the décor and framed photographs are the same; the color of the walls hasn't changed; the furniture sits unmoved. But something is off. Their quiet New Jersey home feels tainted. Angela can sense it. Crawling inside her. Infecting her mind. Poisoning her thoughts. Then the nightmares begin. Awful, lucid visions that cause her to question her own reality.

You might not want to listen to this book after sunset. But if you do, know they’re already watching you, skulking unseen in the shadowy recesses of the darkest corners of the night. This well-collected anthology of eerie stories will frighten your imagination with untold dangers, mysterious disappearances, and baffling experiences. You won’t go out alone at night again after listening to this book!

An unlucky man falls upward into the sky. A disturbing dinner ritual begins with the family removing their left eyes and only grows worse from there… A woman encounters a mysterious entity that allows her to travel through time with gruesome consequences. A rapidly aging child with the ability to control minds forces her father into a nightmare of servitude. A man forms a deadly alliance with the intelligent parasite attached to his neck.

It's the start of summer vacation, and poor Tony has just lost his grandfather. His father is deployed overseas, and his mother is raising him and his little brother all alone. But that's not what's bothering Tony. It's that his nana will be all alone in her small, rural home during the heat of summer, doing the yard work, the laundry, and all the things around the house, while mourning her husband. That won't sit for Tony. With his mother's permission he moves in with Nana for the summer.

Wellman’s work will be remembered, and should be preserved because it combines the dark gothic tradition of the American pulps with a detailed snapshot of regional history and culture. This mixture is shown through the lens of the American modernist tradition, revealing something that is larger than the sum of its parts.

Wander through visions of the most terrible of angels, the Seven who would undo the world. Venture through Hell and back, and lands more terrestrial and darker still. Linger a while in childhoods, and seasons of change by turns tragic and monstrously transformative. Lose yourself amongst the haunted and those who can't let go, in relationships that might have been and never were. Witness in dreams and reflections, hungers and horrors, the shadows cast upon the wall, and linger in forests deep.

All 26 fiendish tales from the best-selling series, A-Z of Horror, by Iain Rob Wright. From neighbourhood yetis to military robots, this terrifying collection has it all and will leave you sleeping with the lights on!

When a scientific expedition is launched to study a mysterious alien race, the only ship available is the Nightflyer, a fully autonomous vessel manned by a single human. But Captain Royd Eris remains locked away, interacting with his passengers only as a disembodied voice - or a projected hologram no more substantial than a ghost. Yet that’s not the only reason the ship seems haunted. The team’s telepath, Thale Lasamer, senses another presence aboard the Nightflyer - something dangerous, volatile, and alien.

Behold the Void includes nine stories of terror that huddle in the dark space between cosmic horror and the modern weird, between old-school hard-edged horror of the 1980s and the stylistic prose of today's literary giants.

The Fogg River Seminary, a girls’ school in a small Illinois town, is supposed to be just another stop on Maryse and Vasyl’s endless travels. They’ve made lucrative use of Maryse’s “foreign” looks in their melodramatic séance act—and an act is all it is. Then, during their performance, a blizzard sweeps in and cuts them off from town completely. In the freezing halls, there’s a voice speaking the secrets of the dead, and Maryse has no choice but to listen…because this time, the voice is real.

It’s business as usual on the set of another cheap sword-and-sandal production by Pharos Pictures—until the lead actress suddenly falls into a deep, mysterious sleep. Jordan Harper can talk down high-strung starlets and knock sense into stuntmen, but this…this is the kind of uncanny problem that he’d usually bring to Mrs. Hope. Unfortunately, the preternaturally capable secretary is on a business trip with the studio head. Harper must get to the bottom of the mystery on his own before another cast member succumbs—or worse, they blow the budget.

The tale of a man who unwittingly angers a sorcerer, who is assumed by some Monty scholars to be based on the self-styled 'Great Beast,' occultist Aleister Crowley. 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.

Black Metal, Body Horror, Dire Futures and Dopplegangers, Possession, Telepathy and other disturbing scenarios. Seven small bites of Scifi-Horror in a novella-length book with an eye toward late-60s, early-70s New Wave of Science Fiction. Think Dangerous Visions and beat-up copies of Analog and Asimov’s Digest.

Beneath the brilliance that was behind The Age of Innocence and Ethan Frome was a dark side. A dark side which produced magnificent tales of the unseen influences in our lives, such as "Mr. Jones", "The Eyes", "Kerfol", "The Ladie's Maid's Bell", and "The Looking Glass".

"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.

The first issue in the second century of Weird Tales features a new HELLBOY story by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden. Editor Jonathan Maberry has built a collection of cosmic horror that will destabilize your worldview.

M. R. James was one of the finest English-language ghostwriters ever published. These short stories are not only classics of their genre, but are outstanding examples of beautifully paced, understated terror and sociological horror, reaching to the dark expanse of the unconscious mind.

When you believe a better life waits for you beyond death, the perfect place to die is a difficult thing to find. Content warning: This story contains self-harm and disordered eating.

Deep in the sewers of New York City, the rat population is growing. Dr. Randolph Finch is determined to break the cycle. His new rodenticide, Degenesis, doesn’t kill rats. It sterilizes them from reproducing. But nothing adapts faster than a New York rat.... City exterminators and soon-to-be divorced Chris and Benita Jackson think they know how these rats think. They know how rats breed. And they fear that Degenesis has only made these rats stronger. More aggressive. More intelligent. And more ravenous than ever...