Gather your familiars near, light your candles, and don your cloaks. October is here!
I’ve been eagerly awaiting this day all the year long, and my most recent posts over the past month have reflected so. We’ve talked atmospheric writing and I’ve discussed my favorite and most anticipated atmospheric reads as well as gothic horror choices that are perfect reading for this most wonderfully eerie season.
As lovely and ghoulish an opportunity as October reading presents, some of us may not have the time to fully commit to novels between all the potion mixing and spirit summoning we’re doing. Or perhaps, like me, you’d like to sprinkle as many creepy stories as possible into your October. Whatever the reason, witchy or not (though I certainly hope witchy), these perfectly horrible short stories may be just what you’re looking for. With numerous classic horror choices as well as a few more modern ones sprinkled in, these short horror stories aren’t ones to miss this October.
20 Short Horror Stories For October Reading
In looking for short horror stories that appealed to me, I found myself gravitating toward more classic stories, written by some of the biggest, most iconic names in all of horror. I’m not surprised by this; I find the approach to horror by classic authors more appealing than much of today’s modern horror, where so many of the synopses I read are completely uninteresting and unappealing to me. However, I have dabbled a bit in Stephen King’s short stories and have included a few worthwhile ones in this list. Also along the way, I discovered several stories I’d never even heard of before by authors I’d never heard of. It’s all terribly exciting, isn’t it?
For some of these short horror stories, like the ones by the first two authors, a synopsis is hardly necessary for such well-known stories. For others, a synopsis gives far too much of the plot’s course away. And for some stories, synopses simply cannot be found. For those reasons, many of the stories within this list will not have synopses. However, they will have links to Goodreads and Book Depository, where you can read more, if you’d like.
The Raven
by Edgar Allan Poe
The Tell-Tale Heart
by Edgar Allan Poe
The Masque of the Red Death
by Edgar Allan Poe
The Fall of the House of Usher
by Edgar Allan Poe
The Whisperer in Darkness
by H.P. Lovecraft
The Dunwich Horror
by H.P. Lovecraft
The Haunter of the Dark
by H.P. Lovecraft
Suffer the Little Children
by Stephen King
Jerusalem’s Lot
by Stephen King
1408
by Stephen King
The Willows
by Algernon Blackwood
Two friends are midway on a canoe trip down the Danube River. Throughout the story Blackwood personifies the surrounding environment—river, sun, wind—and imbues them with a powerful and ultimately threatening character. Most ominous are the masses of dense, desultory, menacing willows, which “moved of their own will as though alive, and they touched, by some incalculable method, my own keen sense of the horrible.” The Willows is one of Algernon Blackwood’s best known short stories. American horror author H.P. Lovecraft considered it to be the finest supernatural tale in English literature. The Willows is an example of early modern horror and is connected within the literary tradition of weird fiction.
The Landlady
by Roald Dahl
The Landlady is a brilliant gem of a short story from Roald Dahl, the master of the sting in the tail. In The Landlady, Roald Dahl, one of the world’s favorite authors, tells a sinister story about the darker side of human nature. Here, a young man in need of room meets a most accommodating landlady . . .
I’m not sure if The Landlady is a short horror story for adults or children. Either way, it could be a fun little read.
The Doll
by Daphne du Maurier
Before she wrote Rebecca, the novel that would cement her reputation as a twentieth-century literary giant, a young Daphne du Maurier penned short fiction in which she explored the images, themes, and concerns that informed her later work. Originally published in periodicals during the early 1930s, many of these stories never found their way into print again . . . until now. Tales of human frailty and obsession, and of romance gone tragically awry, the thirteen stories in The Doll showcase an exciting budding talent before she went on to write one of the most beloved novels of all time. In these pages, a waterlogged notebook washes ashore revealing a dark story of jealousy and obsession, a vicar coaches a young couple divided by class issues, and an older man falls perilously in love with a much younger woman—with each tale demonstrating du Maurier’s extraordinary storytelling gifts and her deep understanding of human nature.
Technically, I’m cheating with this choice because it is a collection of short stories, however, I’m sure you’ll forgive me.
The Inner Room
by Robert Aickman
In perhaps the most magnificent of what he called his ‘strange stories’, Robert Aickman blurs the lines between memory, premonition and the hallucinated life. Lene, a woman now recovering from the losses of the Second World War, recalls a gothic dolls’ house of her childhood and the way in which its uncanny inhabitants entered her dreams. Most chillingly, the geometries of the house didn’t add up; there had to be a secret room inside it. Years later, she comes across a life-size version in a wood not marked on any map . . .
The Turn of the Screw
by Henry James
A very young woman’s first job: governess for two weirdly beautiful, strangely distant, oddly silent children, Miles and Flora, at a forlorn estate…An estate haunted by a beckoning evil. Half-seen figures who glare from dark towers and dusty windows- silent, foul phantoms who, day by day, night by night, come closer, ever closer. With growing horror, the helpless governess realizes the fiendish creatures want the children, seeking to corrupt their bodies, possess their minds, own their souls… But worse-much worse- the governess discovers that Miles and Flora have no terror of the lurking evil. For they want the walking dead as badly as the dead want them.
This is another little cheat. The Turn of the Screw is technically a novella, not a short story. While I’m usually not one to stretch the meaning of “short story,” I’ll let this one slide.
The Room in the Tower
by E.F. Benson
Young Goodman Brown
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Yellow Wallpaper
by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
‘It is stripped off – the paper – in great patches . . . The colour is repellent . . . In the places where it isn’t faded and where the sun is just so – I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about . . .’ Based on the author’s own experiences, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is the chilling tale of a woman driven to the brink of insanity by the ‘rest cure’ prescribed after the birth of her child. Isolated in a crumbling colonial mansion, in a room with bars on the windows, the tortuous pattern of the yellow wallpaper winds its way into the recesses of her mind.
While certainly a descent into madness, I’ll admit I’m not sure if The Yellow Wallpaper will read quite like horror, though it seems to be a classic favorite amongst horror fans, so I’ll take their word for it.
Count Magnus
by M.R. James
Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad
by M.R. James
I haven’t read many short stories in my life. I tend to not think of them very often, my interests generally taking me right to novels, but short stories are an art of their own and I’d like to explore more of them. Especially, of course, short horror stories. There’s such a limited time to make an impact within a short story, so I’m eager to see how they’ll unfold and this October is a perfect chance to weave some of them in.
Have you read any of these short horror stories? Are you going to make any of them a part of your October reading? Let me know in the comments!
Thanks for reading,
Madison
Although I recognize many of these titles, I have only read a couple of them. Horror is not my thing, but I might try to get a couple in. Great list Madison.
Thank you, Carla! Horror isn’t always my thing either, but I’m hoping to find some that I love. I hope you enjoy the stories you try.
The Tell tale heart is my favorite.
I really need to read it again, it’s been too long since I last read it. I think I was still a teenager so I’m excited to see what I’ll make of it now.