Whether it’s campfire tales told with the moon high or bedtime fables told to get children to stay in their beds after lights out, I believe horror fiction is at its purest, most effective form as short prose. These collections of horror, fantasy, sci-fi, and Western tales are all touched by the weird and terrifying. The twin sensations of being unsettled by something you’ve read and of being unable to resist reading on are guiding lights in my own writerly pursuits. These collections and many more played a defining role in shaping my own debut dark fiction collection Pre-Approved for Haunting and Other Stories.
In this new collection of weird, dark stories, and millennial anxieties, Patrick Barb explores themes of family found and lost, media consumption and the dangers of runaway nostalgia, the supernatural in our lives, and the impact of violence in both the long- and short-term.
From rural backwoods to Park Slope brownstones, Barb's characters face impossible, awful situations, testing their inner strength and understanding of reality. Covering quiet horror, weird fiction, supernatural horror, slasher horror, topical dark fiction, and more, these stories spotlight supposedly familiar terrors and fears in new and unexpected ways.
Blending sci-fi, fantasy, and horror, Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man takes readers to places they’ve likely only seen in their dreams or, more likely, their nightmares.
From heartbreaking tales of space disasters (“Kaleidoscope”) to frightening tales of a VR nursery gone wild (“The Veldt”), the strength of Bradbury’s legendary fiction is found in the way he brought humanity to even the wildest, most out-of-this-world premise. In addition, his immaculate prose is as much a joy to appreciate on the word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence levels, as it is on the story level.
The Illustrated Man was one of the first short story collections I ever read. The fact that so many of the tales included within its pages still stick with me to this day is proof of its power and legacy.
A classic collection of stories - all told on the skin of a man - from the author of Fahrenheit 451.
If El Greco had painted miniatures in his prime, no bigger than your hand, infinitely detailed, with his sulphurous colour and exquisite human anatomy, perhaps he might have used this man's body for his art...
Yet the Illustrated Man has tried to burn the illustrations off. He's tried sandpaper, acid, and a knife. Because, as the sun sets, the pictures glow like charcoals, like scattered gems. They quiver and come to life. Tiny pink hands gesture, tiny mouths flicker…
When I first read this compendium edition collecting the three volumes of Barker’s ground-breaking debut short-story collections my interest in horror and dark fantasy was only recently reignited. Stories like “Fear” and “In the Hills, The Cities” (one of my favorite short stories of all time) opened my mind to the possibilities of fear and phantasmagoria that one could achieve in a brief span of time.
Barker’s prose and characters are lurid, provocative, and unashamed of who/what they are. Not only was he taking risks in crafting these stories, he was also inviting subsequent generations of writers to express themselves fearlessly. While Stephen King’s impact on contemporary mainstream horror and thriller writing is well known, Barker’s hand in shaping the more literary and plain weird side of horror should not be overlooked.
While trending more toward the fantasy side, then the previous picks on the list here, Link still manages to pull out some of the most unsettling moments in a short story that I’ve ever read.
When I finished her story “Some Zombie Contingency Plans,” I found myself immediately flipping back to the beginning of the story and reading it fresh. Link is masterful when it comes to weaving together narrative threads, playing literary sleight of hand. While the collection and one of the stories within are called “Magic for Beginners,” she’s very much an expert.
The cross-genre blending is very much following in the footsteps of Bradbury, giving a more fantasy-style focus where his work trends toward science fiction.
Best of the Decade: Salon, The A.V. Club "If I had to pick the most powerfully original voice in fantasy today, it would be Kelly Link. Her stories begin in a world very much like our own, but then, following some mysterious alien geometry, they twist themselves into something fantastic and, frequently, horrific. You won't come out the same person you went in."-Lev Grossman, The Week "Highly original."-Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Dazzling."-Entertainment Weekly (grade: A, Editor's Choice) "Darkly playful."-Michael Chabon Best of the Year: Time Magazine, Salon, Boldtype, PopMatters. Kelly Link's engaging and funny stories riff on haunted convenience stores,…
No one writing horror fiction today is better at punching the reader in the guts (or ripping those guts out and showing them to you) like Stephen Graham Jones. While he’s been touted more recently for his novel-length works, I first came to know SGJ’s writing via short stories. This collection is one of several stand-outs from his catalog.
When it comes to horror and weird fiction writing, SGJ’s versatility knows no bounds. Whether it’s the literary strangeness of “Father, Son, Holy Rabbit,” or the freaky folk horror of “Raphael” (elements of which SGJ has revisited in his Indian Lake novel trilogy), there are all kinds of scares in this collection. He even pulls off a shocking jump-scare fright in “Crawlspace” that has to be experienced first-hand.
These thirteen stories are our own lives, inside out. A boy's summer
romance doesn't end in that good kind of heartbreak, but in blood. A girl
on a fishing trip makes a friend in the woods who's exactly what she
needs, except then that friend follows her back to the city. A father hears a
voice through his baby monitor that shouldn't be possible, but now he
can't stop listening. A woman finds out that the shipwreck wasn't
the disaster, but who she's shipwrecked with. A big brother learns just
what he will, and won't, trade for one night of…
While his stories might be some of the shortest word-count-wise from the tales featured in these listed collections, Brian Evenson’s prose does not lack for the weird and terrifying.
With many pieces going no further than the flash fiction of 1000 or so words, Evenson’s writing has taught me that it’s not about how many words you use, but how you use them.
In this collection, he adds Westerns to the mix of genres where horror and the weird can take seed and bloom into something mind-bendingly unsettling. “Black Bark” is one such story. At first, it seems to be a tale of two Wild West bandits on the run but as the nightmarish end arrives, readers will find they’ve been reading a very different tale all along.
A stuffed bear's heart beats with the rhythm of a dead baby, Reno keeps receding to the east no matter how far you drive, and in a mine on another planet, the dust won't stop seeping in. In these stories, Evenson unsettles us with the everyday and the extraordinary the terror of living with the knowledge of all we cannot know.
Praise for Brian Evenson:
"Brian Evenson is one of the treasures of American story writing, a true successor both to the generation of Coover, Barthelme, Hawkes and Co., but also to Edgar Allan Poe." Jonathan Lethem
One summer night in a small prairie city, 18-year-old Gabriel Reece accidentally outs himself to his redneck brother Colin, flees on his motorcycle, and gets struck by lightning on his way out of town.
He’s strangely fine, walking away from his melted pile of bike without a scratch. There’s no time to consider his new inhuman durability before his brother disappears and his childhood home burns down. He’s become popular, too—local cops and a weird private eye are after him, wanting to know if his brother is behind a recent murder.
Answers might be in the ashes of the house where Gabe and Colin grew up, if Gabe and his friends can stay alive and out of jail long enough to find them.
On Friday, Gabriel Reece gets struck by lightning while riding his motorcycle.
It's not the worst thing that happens to him that week.
Gabe walks away from a smoldering pile of metal without a scratch-or any clothes, which seem to have been vaporized. And that's weird, but he's more worried about the sudden disappearance of his brother, Colin, who ditched town the second Gabe accidentally outed himself as gay.
Gabe tries to sift through fragmented memories of his crummy childhood for clues to his sudden invincibility, but he barely has time to think before people around town start turning up…
