Ten Great spooky stories for Halloween

Every Fall for the past few years, I’ve run an event at the Museum called “The Horror in the Museum”. It’s a Halloween storytelling event where Hartwick faculty, staff, and students read their favorite pieces of short, spooky Halloween fiction. Many of participants are excited to read, but don’t always know what to choose, and so ask me for suggestions. This, plus my being a voracious reader and appreciator of horror, means that I have a running list of great short spooky stories. What follows is some stories that I’ve suggested to readers over the years, other short stories that I love, and others that have stuck with me for various other reasons. If you’re looking for some bite-sized Halloween-season scares, these are tasty morsels! (Also, there’s no particular order other than how I wrote them!)

• “The Summer People” by Shirley Jackson. Link here
  • I ran across this story in the wonderful anthology “The Weird” edited by the Vandermeers. Most people read “the Lottery” in high school, but this story leaves that in the dust. Very little actually happens–a wealthy family, staying in their summer cabin somewhere away from the city they normally call home, decides to stay into the fall instead of going back. That’s it, that’s the story! And yet, by the last page, I was white-knuckle clutching the book, gasping at each subsequent sentence. It’s a stunning piece of prose suspense.
• “Thus I Refute Beelzy” by John Collier. Link here
  • I found this in some 1970s anthology that I picked up for the cover art. It’s a satisfying story of childhood vengeance, wrought on a patriarchal and violent father. Also, never forget the visceral creepiness that comes from a child describing the actions of an imaginary friend!
• The Temple by HP Lovecraft Link here
  • I think it’s one of Lovecraft’s best short pieces. For one thing, it features an unusual HPL narrator; a nationalist German U-Boat captain, and a consumate materialist, contra Lovecraft’s usual array of idealistic dreamers and seekers of hidden knowledge. For another, it leaves most of the supernatural element off-stage (or rather, out the porthole), giving the whole thing an ambiguous menace. A masterpiece.
• Old Virginia by Laird Barron Link here, but really, go buy Barron’s first collection The Imago Sequence. Or anything by him, really.
  • Laird Barron is one of the best horror writers working today. He writes cosmic horror like Lovecraft did, but he’s a much better prose writer than Lovecraft with a propulsive and minimalist tone that makes his work really gripping. That’s all display in “Old Virginia” which is the first Barron story I remember reading, and one of the best–a past-his-prime private security merc gets roped into guarding an isolated military facility in the Appalachian mountains, and slowly learns what it is he’s guarding. It’s too long to read out loud quickly, but I can imagine it would be stunning to hear performed.
• The Mezzotint by M.R. James. Link here
  • I performed this story a few years ago, and unfortunetly had to edit it to get it down to our 15 minute timeslots. That’s a shame because so much of of the strength of this story is in the small details, from the architectural descriptions of the house in the eponymous print to the quotations from fictional histories, guides, and catalogs scattered throughout. Plus, it’s a story about the secrets of objects, something near and dear to my heart, as an archaeologist and curator.
• “The Tale of Lady Mary and Mr. Fox” traditional British folktale. Link here to the Joseph Jacobs version
  • My first memory of this story is hearing it told by Tony Barrand in his Folklore class at Boston University. His rhythm captured both the terror and the humor of this story (“the severed hand fell right into her lap!"), and he also talked about how uncommon it was for folktales to have active, smart women as protagonists. This is an old story, certainly hundreds and maybe thousands of years old. There’s a good summary of the history and alternative versions of this story here
• “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe. Link here
  • I know everybody has read this. Read it out loud to yourself sometime. Read it in the mirror. Watch yourself read it, watch how your face changes when you describe the old man’s eye or the narrator’s fury and terror when the heart begins to beat. This is an amazing story to hear performed well.
• “The Yellow Sign” by Robert W. Chambers. Link Here
  • Lovecraft loved this story. So did the guy who created “True Detective”. It’s definitely late-Victorian in style–florid prose, lots of moralizing about the neer-do-well artists and models who are the main characters, etc… But the fundamental strangeness of this story starts on the first page, and grows to encompass the whole world. It’s genuinely terrifying to watch the play “the King in Yellow” taking over everyone’s consciousness, like the ocean carrying a piece of driftwood out to sea.
• “Black Bark” by Brian Evenson. Go buy Evenson’s books, they’re all great!
  • I’ve read Evenson stories over the years in varous anthologies, and always apprecaited his austere, meticulous prose. This is from his collection “A Collapse of Horses”. His stories straddle lines of genre, but always with a fundamental weirdness to them, that sometimes spills over into horror, as it does here, and other times he keeps pulled back. In that, he reminds me of Robert Aickman; both of them are skilled at finding a sense of menace in the mundane. This is a great introduction to what Evenson does well–the end of a gritty western, when the outlaws ride away, injured and dying, and what they meet in the darkness beyond the horizon.
• “Shaft 247” by Basil Copper. Not on-line, but apparently Cthulhu 2000 is still in print
  • I read this in a Lovecraft-inspired anthology with the unpreposessing title “Cthulhu 2000”. There are some good stories in it, but the best ones (see also “Black Man with the Horn” by TED Klein, or “24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai by Roger Zelazny) keep Lovecraft’s more direct influence off the page. Nowhere is that clearer than in “Shaft 247”, a science-fiction story about guards in an underground facility who discover some anomalies in the eponymous (and supposedly uninhabted) shaft. I haven’t re-read this in years, but I still think about simple lines from that story, and the terrifying thrill of their simplicity. “Something is turning the bolts from the other side”