Short Horror

The supernatural, the surreal, and the all-too real . . . Such tales of the dark and the unknown have always fascinated us, and modern authors carry on the disquieting traditions of the past while inventing imaginative new ways to unsettle us. Chosen from a wide variety of venues, these stories are as eclectic and varied as shadows.

Popular Reddit NoSleep author J.G. Martin invites you into his skewed world: A government agent searches for a terrifying urban legend. A research expedition vanishes, leaving behind a journal with disturbing implications. A team of astronauts uncover madness on the dark side of the moon. Experience these nightmares and more in this collection of Martin’s most celebrated tales. Immerse yourself in a world that's never what it seems, a world that chills you with every minute and haunts you long after you leave.

John Glover reads a selection of unabridged short stories, including "Gray Matter" from Stephen King's best-selling collection Night Shift...

An exploited child worker in the silver mines of Bolivia finds an ally – but at what cost? A young woman's affair has terrifying repercussions when her lover's wife dies. A sailor's wife takes her communion with Nature a little too far…From a hungry young woman who is not what she seems, to a boy who has taken his mother's advice a little too seriously; from disfigured girls willing to pay any price to fit in, to an immigrant who cannot escape his tormentor; from a new home with a sinister secret, this collection plumbs the depths of the psyche and dredges up some very modern horrors.

A scientist’s invention unleashes spectral siblings with a taste for blood. Two brothers discover an ancient horror lurking beneath a frozen lake. And a girl must make the ultimate sacrifice to free her sister from eternal darkness. Scare Street is proud to present the best in spine-tingling supernatural horror. This volume contains three blood-soaked tales of terror, packed with ghosts, ghouls, and other children of the night.

A trip to a historic cemetery reveals that a young man’s girlfriend may be more than what she seems. The dead hold a burial ceremony of their own, after a violent criminal incites their wrath. And a night watchman’s obsession with old bones leads him to dig up the wrong grave. Scare Street is proud to present the best in bone-chilling supernatural horror. This volume contains three spine-tingling tales for your listening pleasure. And each story carries a chill from beyond the grave, guaranteed to make your skin crawl.

The horrors of war drive an antique collector to a bloody situation. A retro computer gives an unsuspecting enthusiast a supernatural shock. And a group of robbers finds themselves trapped in a house with sinister collection…. The spirits who dwell in the shadowy realm between life and death have their own special hobbies to share. Some collect tears, others horde screams. A few crave flesh and blood. And one way or another, they’d love to add you to their collection tonight….

WORLD FANTASY AWARD WINNER! BRAM STOKER AWARD FINALIST A diabolical collection of stories featuring achingly human characters whose lives intertwine with ghosts, goblins, and the macabre, by “Buenos Aires’s sorceress of horror” (Samanta Schweblin, The New York Times) “Entertaining...

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.

A college student discovers an ancient game of chess, with deadly consequences for the loser. And a drunken one-night stand at a frat party traps an unlucky student in a diabolical bargain. Now put down your pencils. The test is over, and this sinister school of the supernatural grades on a very steep curve. Those who don’t make the cut will have to stay after class. Let’s hope you survive the extra-credit assignment….

The supernatural, the surreal, and the all-too real . . . tales of the dark. Such stories have always fascinated us, and modern authors carry on the disquieting traditions of the past while inventing imaginative new ways to unsettle us. Chosen from a wide variety of venues, these stories are as eclectic and varied as shadows. This volume of The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror offers tales from some of today's finest writers of the fantastique. Sure to delight as well as disturb!

Martin Lorensen is a twenty-three-year-old counselor for disturbed teenagers. He’s bright, compassionate, attractive, and outgoing. He’s also—and this is the most interesting thing—not dead. Martin has improbably survived not one but two deadly disasters that claimed dozens of lives. The kid is riding one hell of a lucky streak. Two federal agents think there is something darker at play. Now that they’ve arranged to interview Martin, they want answers. Martin is ready to share everything he knows. One thing is for certain: when it comes to escaping death, luck doesn’t figure into it at all.

In The Dunwich Horror, Lovecraft lays further ground in the Cthulu mythos. Alongside The Dunwich Horror are the stories "Dagon", "The Call of Cthulhu", "The Lurking Fear", "Imprisoned with the Pharoahs", "The Music of Erich Zann", "Randolph Carter", "In the Walls of Eryx", and "The Transition of Juan Romero".

A cemetery full of the restless dead. A town so wicked it has already burned twice, with the breath of the third fire looming. A rural, isolated bridge with a terrifying monster waiting for the completion of its summoning ritual. A lake that allows the drowned to return, though they have been changed by the claws of death. These are the shadowed, liminal spaces where the curses and monsters lurk, refusing to be forgotten.

It was a killer year for horror fiction of the harder kind. Authors, editors, and publishers presented readers with some startling works of horrific imagination, stories graphic in the extreme yet with subtleties suggesting larger meanings, tales that explore humanity by plumbing depths of soulless inhumanity and, in some cases, outright depravity. The stories here represent the best of them, disturbing tales that dig deep and take you into the dark heart of horror itself, unrelenting and unapologetic.

From zombie apocalypse to hard science fiction, urban fantasy to Lovecraftian gothic horror, Chris' writing surely offers you something to enjoy. New Worlds features several short stories; "The Mother in the Lake" (a Lovecraft-inspired tale told by a teenage girl about her family and their lake house), "Roots Grown Deep" (a dark fantasy story about a tree deep in the woods that hungers for far more than water and sun); and more.

A newborn’s absent face appears on the back of someone else’s head, a filmmaker goes to gruesome lengths to achieve the silence he’s after for his final scene, and a therapist begins, impossibly, to appear in a troubled patient's room late at night. In these stories of doubt, delusion, and paranoia, no belief, no claim to objectivity, is immune to the distortions of human perception. Here, self-deception is a means of justifying our most inhuman impulses—whether we know it or not.

A sentient, murderous prosthetic leg; shadowy creatures lurking behind a shimmering wall; brutal barrow men: Of all the terrors that populate The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, perhaps the most alarming are the beings who decimated the habitable Earth: humans. In this new short-story collection, Brian Evenson envisions a chilling future beyond the Anthropocene that forces excruciating decisions about survival and self-sacrifice in the face of toxic air and a natural world torn between revenge and regeneration.

The war is tearing our world apart. Instead of big armies with tanks in the field, the Vampire War is fought in the streets, neighbor against neighbor, family against family. Anyone can turn at any time. The blood hunger can suddenly appear in the middle of a kiss. The person who sleeps next to you every night could wake up in the dead of night... hungry. So hungry.

At sixteen, Sadie Young had a brush with death, and as a result she became more sensitive to the supernatural. Rather than embrace this gift, she spent years running from it, and from the darkness that once preyed upon her. Now twenty-five and working as a librarian, Sadie is called upon by a desperate family friend to look into a strange series of events. A teenaged girl has entered a reputedly haunted house in town and has gone mad. Committed, the girl attempts suicide and claims to be terrorized at all hours by a horrific specter known as "Mother Maggot."