My Top Ten Halloween Short Stories

Top ten Halloween Short Stories that I’ve Read so Far

The Fall of the House of Usher, by Edgar Allen Poe

Roderick Usher has a ‘family secret.’ Years of inbreeding have warped the family tree, to the point its rotten to the roots. When the unnamed narrator comes to the abode of the said gentleman, he finds the house, and its inhabitants wasting away from disease and dereliction. Here, Usher, and his consumptive sister roam through the dark vestibules and chambers, like lost ghosts without a cause. When Usher’s kindred finally succumbs to her degenerative illness, the proprietor has plans for her disposal. However, something goes wrong, and even the doors of death can’t be closed up forever. ‘You have not seen it. But stay! You Shall.’ So says Usher, and with it, he hearkens in the archetypal buried alive story. A tale of hysteria, claustrophobia, and pot-boiler tension, this has to be one of the best gothic tales ever written.

The Monkey’s Paw, by W.W. Jacobs 

This short story deserves much more praise and attention, for it is one of the most chilling I’ve ever read. It also happens to be my favourite ghost story. It begins in a cottage in midst of wilderness and countryside. Here, a family wile away the hours in the candlelit darkness. One night, an unexpected visitor knocks. It is a passing soldier, and with him, he carries a cursed monkey’s paw that grants its owner three wishes. The family decide to procure the talisman from the soldier and keep it in their home. Their first wish is to have two hundred pounds worth of gold delivered to them. This comes the next day. as an insurance payout. Their son, who was only with them the night before, has been found dead, apparently killed while operating machinery. The Monkey’s Paw inevitably grants a second wish. Later, in the dead of night, scratching is heard on the door, rattling at the chain. Someone wants to be let in. 

The Rocking Horse Winner, D.H. Lawrence.

Paul is a young boy who grows up in an unlucky family. Indeed, so much so, that the house he lives in becomes haunted. Whispering is heard around the rooms: ‘There must be more money, there must be more money.’ To please his mother he takes to gambling to increase his chances of success, in tandem he rides his nursery rocking horse. Time passes and he becomes obsessed with the contraption. He rides it harder, faster, more incessantly. He pants, laughs, moans upon it. Every moment of every day is spent in a frenzied riding of the rocking horse. Even as adolescence dawns, Paul can’t relinquish his uncanny past time. But he has a secret. By riding the rocking horse he has clairvoyant epiphanies of the races and who is most likely to win. The price of this success, could however, be too high to pay. What makes this tale even more creepy is the underlying theme of burgeoning sexuality and incest. 

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, Ambrose Bierce 

On the surface this short story doesn’t seem particularly Gothic. Nevertheless it is really quite a devilish tale, written by quite a devilish man. The narrative begins with Peyton Farquhar, a confederate sympathizer in the American Civil War, who after plotting to sabotage owl creek bridge is arrested by union soldiers and sentenced to death. There we see him, all set to be hanged from the bridge and his patriotic life will come to a miserable end. Something goes wrong though. The rope snaps. Peyton finds himself flung into the tumultuous waters beneath. Sodden and shivering, with bullets flying over his head he makes it to the river banks. In a delirium he runs through the forests woods. He finds his house and his wife greets him. All is saved or so he thinks...

At the Mountains of Madness, H.P. Lovecraft 

- A university led mission to Antarctica uncovers a vast underworld necropolis of an ancient Alien Civilization. Here the ‘Elder Things’ still roam the labyrinthian trails. Awakened from their slumber, these cryptoids slaughter and dissect the terrified group now trapped under the ice. Further horrors awake, when the group discovers evidence that the ‘Elder Things’ are themselves falling victim to an even more dangerous creatures. These are ‘Shoggoths’ giant parasites, that feed off living life forms. Grisly ends, and frantic escapes. Lost civilizations, arcane monstrosities. The Mountains of Madness is a tour de force of terror and suspense.

The Mist, Stephen King 

  Some of you have seen the brilliant cinematic rendition of this scary story. Imagine seeing a false widow spider clinging to your bathroom wall. The shudder that runs through you, the creeping of flesh, that would undoubtably accost you, is magnified tenfold in King’s masterpiece. A government experiment has gone wrong, a miasma and fog has obscured everything. Living inside it, are giant spiders, cockroaches, beetles and lice. With no other place to go a small community is trapped in the local supermarket, with only a thin wall of glass separating them from the insects outside. Interestingly, King’s version has a different ending than the film’s

The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

On the surface, John is a doting husband and physician to his sick wife. She has got what the nineteenth century called a nervous disease, and as a result he has decided to relocate them both to a colonial mansion for a respite. Here John’s wife, our narrator, is looked after very carefully, holed up particular room with yellow wallpaper. The problem is, ‘There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will.’ The narrator tells us people are lurking in the walls, ‘Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over’ Living with such a bedfellow constantly seeking to climb out the yellow wallpaper, means the narrator descends into madness. But what is more sinister, a ghost hiding in the walls? or a woman locked up and sent mad by a tyrannical patriarch? The question means this story will continue to enthrall many generations to come.

The Black Cat, Edgar Allen Poe

 A memoir of a wife murderer. The narrator calmly states ‘I buried an axe in her brain.’ However, the chilling quality of the story is achieved by Poe’s magisterial depiction and internal thinking of a psychopath. He is charming, superficial, glib and wholly lacking in empathy, but he is the protagonist, meaning we are forced to empathize with him. This only adds to our unease. Nevertheless the narrator has a strange preoccupation with cats, sometimes he likes them, sometimes he plucks out their eyes or hangs them from trees. Through all wanderings of his twisted mind and body, black cats haunt his journey, and even after his wife’s death the feline companions still has something left to give.

Child that Went With The Fairies, by Sheridan La Fanu 

a little gem of a story. A poor family live in the Irish countryside of Limerick; a place replete with fairies, sprites, banshees and goblins. While three children are playing, a mysterious carriage approaches but it is the creatures on board are what really scares them: ‘Sallow features, and small, restless fiery eyes, and faces of cunning [...] The little coachman was scowling and showing his white fangs under his cocked hat and his blazing beads of eyes quivered with fury.’ The youngest boy is kidnapped, by such entities, and so begins a mad desperate search to find him.

The Man in the Black Suit, by Stephen King.

Gary is an old man when the story begins but he is haunted by a terrible memory. One day out fishing in the backwoods he wakes up to find a man in a black suit sitting next to him. He has eyes made of fire, roll on his back when he cackles, and spread lies. He tells the boy, his mother’s dead, his father will molest him, that he will eat the his flesh. Gary eventually learns, this perverse and evil man is actually the devil. One summers day in the 1930’s, in the woods and by the creeks, the oldest villain has appeared and looks set to devour his plump little companion. The race is on to find the escape. 

The Last Fighting Tommy, by Harry Patch, and Richard Van Emden

The Last Fighting Tommy, by Harry Patch with Richard Van Emden

If you are British, you may have heard of Harry Patch. He was until his death, the last surviving veteran of the trenches in World War One. He also reached the remarkable age of 111 years, and upon his centurion, the British public became enamored by him. Popping up for interviews here and there, he became an quasi mythical figure, a man from another world, so to speak, and the last to have witnessed the horror of war, and able to deliver its testament.

I must admit though, I was reluctant to read the book. Until we stop glorifying war we are destined to repeat it. Despite Wilfred Owen’s wonderful poem Dulce Et Decorum Est, it seems the love affair with the British Military is still going strong. Percy Shelley said: ‘Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: He only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.’ While I would not go quite as far, I’m inclined to agree with him.

Of course, from 1914-18, British men didn’t have a choice in the matter, and poetic maxims were useless. Despite this, Harry is quite adamant, he never wanted to go to battle. He states ‘I had no inclination to fight anybody. I mean why should I go out and kill somebody I never knew, and for what reason?’ He even goes as far to call war, ‘legalized mass murder.’ What comes across in the story is Harry’s humility. There is not a trace of ego in his reflections, and he seems simply a good man, who lived an honest life. This is something so refreshing, in today’s world. 

The autobiography is also a record of the trenches. Harry states: ‘It doesn’t matter how much training you had, you can’t prepare for the reality, the noise, the filth, the uncertainty and the call for stretcher bearers.’ It was a time of perpetual terror, and sometimes boredom. Lightning flash scenes of bombed out villages, eviscerated soldiers, and pulverized bodies. However, war only made up a small portion of Patch’s life and a part he’d rather forget. His recollections are overall an intimate vision into life in both the Edwardian Era before the War, and then the era of the Empire’s decline, after it. The author is a fantastic storyteller, and his thoughts are rich with sensual detail. This makes the book a evocative read.

The biography is called the Last Fighting Tommy but perhaps it shouldn’t be. Unfortunately we define Harry Patch, as a veteran of the trenches and an extremely old man. Both are destinies he couldn’t help! Behind this, he was also a husband, father, plumber, business-man and quiet celebrity, whose life spanned ten decades. It is nice to see, that this other side of Patch was also felt and explored in the book. 

Harry died in 2009. At his state and ceremonial funeral, he requested, no guns were to be carried. Of Armistice day, he stated, ‘it is nothing but a show of military force. I don’t think there is any actual remembrance, except for those who have lost someone they really cared for [...] That day the day, I lost my pals, 22 September 1917 - That is my Remembrance.’ I think the biggest tragedy of human nature is our ability to forget, and our ability to be fooled. With the death of the last fighting tommy we lost a man who had really seen the reality of war in all its ugliness, and as such he was indispensable. This is a profoundly moving autobiography, of love, loss and trauma. Behind the soldier was man just like me or you.

Doctor Sleep, By Stephen King

Doctor Sleep, By Stephen King - A Review, with a dash of literary criticism

Who can forget Mrs Maissy in The Shining. The dried up old hag of the Overlook Hotel, that lurks in room 217 and climbs out the bath to strangle any intruders. Certainly not Danny Torrance! Doctor Sleep, begins with her reappearance:

‘Sometimes you had to know. You had to see [...] Naked on the toilet with her legs spread, and her pallid thighs bulging. Her greenish breasts hung down like deflated balloons [...] Her eyes were also grey like steel mirrors. She saw him and her lips stretched back in a grin.’

Yikes! The hero of the story, now an adult, intuitively recognises: ‘The Overlook hotel hadn’t finished with him yet.’ 

So begins a journey of rediscovery, where the future is always begotten by the past, and destiny begins in childhood. Like his father, Danny is now an alcoholic. He still possesses what the old caretaker of the Overlook, called ‘the shining,’ a psychic gift of clairvoyance. Like his father, he too will wrestle with his own inner demons, and ultimately confront the original trauma, in more ways the one. When Abra an adolescent girl contacts him telepathically, he is swept into a life or death struggle, with a band of life-sucking vampires, the ‘True Knot,’ who will stop at nothing to capture them.

One of the central themes of the novel is intoxication. Danny is a drunk like his father, but the story’s arch-villains, are also drunks. The only difference is, that the ‘True Knot’ rely on a different sort of spirit, to gain their inebriation. The sought-after drug, is known as steam, (also called shining) but they can only ingest it, by torturing children until the magic vapour, leaks out the pores of their victims. Danny belongs to the Alcoholics Anonymous, Rose the Hat (the lead vampire) belongs to the True Knot. In affect both are part of a community with an addiction problem. Nevertheless, it is Danny, and his fellow brethren, that are able to take responsibility for their actions, and reduce whatever destruction they have caused. The True Knot, in contrast, revel in it.

The other theme is sleep, and the books title, is of course Doctor Sleep. Danny works at a hospice where old people go to die. Here he develops a cherished gift of helping the terminally-ill crossover to the next world. He says to each patient: ‘Theres nothing to fear, you just need to sleep.’ The problem is, that the ‘True Knot’ also have a gift of helping people fall asleep (permanently), and their tagline - ‘don’t you need to sleep?’ echoes Danny’s message.

We get to a point where, the heros and villains share uncomfortable similarities. Hamlet wonders, ‘To sleep, perchance to Dream [...] For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come.’ For Stephen King, the psychic gift of ‘the shining’ is indeed a power that can lead its recipients into dream worlds, which are sometimes nightmares, sometimes fantasies, but both a world’s beyond this life. Clearly sleep is not the peaceful crossing over it’s made out to be, and there is something to fear from it after all!

Whether it is because I read the Shining when I was twelve, or because I have studied literature at university, I found Doctor Sleep just not that scary. It is an exciting and enjoyable page-turner, but it doesn’t contain that original claustrophobic scare the original novel provoked. In fact, reading King’s work has now become a sort of guilty pleasure for me, simply because his stories are unliterary and the monsters are adolescent.

Nevertheless the overall story is more profound and complex than the surface ghosts make it. King has matured in his style, to write about some pretty hefty philosophical topics. His writing, is also contemporary, true to life, and more importantly invested with insight and love. As a result we care about the characters. Can Danny, and his little shining prodigy, Abra defeat the True Knot? This is what makes the book so exciting and unputdownable.

Overall, this is an good novel, albeit not as good as its predecessor. However, King is to much of a gifted storyteller for his readers to ever outgrow him completely. Behind all the ghosts, ghouls and dream landscapes, is the real world of love, compassion friendship, life and death. These are the real hallways through which King continues to weave his fiction.