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.