Monday 30 September 2019

31 Great Horror Stories You Can Read Online For Free (Part 1)


There are two kinds of people in the world - those who understand that Hallowe’en begins at midnight on the 30th of September, and those who are wrong. Three years ago, I made an abortive attempt at the 31 Days of Horror on my Youtube channel. It resulted in my most-viewed video to date, but I crapped out in the second week when the election in the US happened and I decided to focus on politics. I now understand that my opinions on the arts are far more important than America’s gradual descent into fascism, so I’ve decided to give it another go. 
    For those who aren’t familiar with 31 Days of Horror, it’s a thing Youtubers do wherein they watch a horror film every day of October, and then make a video about it. I’ll be doing it slightly differently, though, because I don't have that much time these days. Instead of doing a video for my Youtube channel every day, I’ll be putting up a blog post relating to the horror genre - most will be about films, but some, like this one, will be more generally related to horror, because I get bored easily and rules are for losers. 
    This, then, is the opening salvo of my 31 Days of Horror, and what better way to celebrate off the Hallowe’en season than by reading a different horror story every day of this month? Here’s the first part of my thirty-one great horror stories you can read online for free - the rest will be coming later on in the month.


If you need proof that the distinction between “literary” and “genre” fiction is entirely artificial, look no further than this story. Written by the lit snob’s favourite, the prophet of the postmodern, the quintessential academic’s writer David Foster Wallace, this is nevertheless horror to the core. It’s a short story - you can read it on your tea break - but no less impactful for that. DFW left not an ounce of fat on this story, throwing the audience headlong into every parent’s nightmare, and leaving them there.

2. Rachel J Llewellyn - “Date Night”

“Date Night,” like most of my favourite horror stories, is nasty, brutish and short - so short, in fact, that there’s not much I can say without spoiling it. It concerns a man who has trouble with women, and the lengths he will go to to get the girl of his dreams - beyond that, you’ll just have to read it.

 3. Joe R Lansdale - “The Duck Hunt”

I’ve not read much Lansdale - just this and a story he contributed to a bizarro anthology - but if it’s all like this, I’m a fan. He gets the perfect balance of horror and sardonic humour, so that the silliness of the situation adds to, rather than detracts from, the fear. This is the kind of horror that aims to disturb, rather than frighten - the kind that makes you feel as if you’ve slipped into a world almost identical to our own, but seen through a funhouse mirror. 


I don’t mean to set up impossible expectations, but this is probably the greatest horror story ever written. A teenage girl sees a strange man while out with her friends; the next day, he appears at her house while her parents are away, and tries to convince her to go for a ride with them. I’ve read nothing else by Oates, but this story alone is enough for her to stand alongside any prose writer in the pantheon - horror or otherwise - and not suffer by comparison.

5. Jeff Vandermeer - “The Third Bear”

A mounting feeling of dread is not something most people place high on their list of desirable qualities in a work of art, but it’s something I look for. I love a story or a film that captures the sense of things going seriously, irrevocably wrong, and “The Third Bear” does that better than any short story I’ve ever read. The people of a medieval village have been menaced by three bears, two of which they killed - it’s a simple set-up, but Vandermeer takes the story down a road only he could navigate. The hopelessness that pervades this story stuck with me for days. Render unto Seether…

6. Laird Barron - “Frontier Death Song”

Cross Ernest Hemingway with Jack London, graft four extra testicles onto the resulting offspring, have it raised by Thom Jones and you’ll have Laird Barron. He was raised by a survivalist father who would take him into the wilds of Alaska for over a year at a time to live off the land; he raised and trained sled dogs for a time, and has raced thrice in the Iditarod; and he’s probably the only Bram Stoker Award-winner to boast a five hundred pound deadlift - with a biography like that, it’s hard to imagine him not being a hell of a writer. “Frontier Death Song” displays Barron’s talents as a writer of both horror and noir, pitting a retired dogsled racer against the forces of Hell. The prose is tight and it’s plot-driven in a way that most stories of this length can’t pull off - there’s a reason Barron is one of the most esteemed writers in modern horror.

7. Alanna J Faelan - “The Taurid Branch”

This story will break your fucking heart. Suffused with a deep sense of loss, this is the best example I could find of emotionally-driven horror, and it got much scarier once I realised that the Taurid meteor stream is a real thing, and we pass through it twice a year.


I can’t quite put into words what makes this story so affecting. The concept is great - women all across the world suddenly become unkillable. They can still die of natural causes, but any attempt at murder fails. The story follows Edith, the wife of a police superintendent, as she prepares to act as executioner to a murderess (the thinking being that, as all the failed murder attempts have been by men, perhaps a woman can still be killed by another woman). 
    It’s not any of the elements of the story, though - it’s something in the conjunction of those elements. The imagery of the story is strangely beautiful (a man attempts to smother a woman, and she grows new mouths on her arms; a man tries to drown a woman, and she develops gills); McCombs has a good ear for prose; and the character of Edith is interesting, and gets more development than characters often do in short stories; but it’s something unnameable in the way they combine, like notes in strange music, that gives the story its magic. McCombs is one to watch.

9. Algernon Blackwood - “The Wendigo”

Blackwood rarely gets the credit he deserves as a writer of cosmic horror. Lovecraft is the name everyone knows, but Blackwood was just as important to the development of the genre and (so far as I know) was just regular old-timey racist, not Lovecraft level racist. 
    Blackwood’s fiction speaks to me more than Lovecraft’s, and I think part of that is that Blackwood’s horror is much more grounded in nature. As frightening as it can be to think of otherworldly gods watching us from realms beyond the human imagination, it’s much more chilling when the monster is present in nature, as much a part of the landscape as the sea or the rocks. There’s an almost folk-horror aesthetic to Blackwood’s fiction, and one gets the sense that this story’s eponymous monster is no different from a bear or a wolf - just another creature that we share the wilderness with, but far more powerful and strange than any animal we know.

10. Merc Fenn Wolfmoor - “Sweet Dreams Are Made of You”

This one creeped me right the fuck out. The development of the concept is what makes the story so frightening, so I’ll avoid spoiling it here, but I can explain the basics. A company has created an immersive virtual-reality game where an anonymous girl eats you - there’s no blood, no pain, it’s basically a vore fantasy. Think of the creepiest possible development of that set-up, and you’ll probably still fall short of Wolfmoor’s imagination. “Sweet Dreams Are Made Of You” begins with a deeply unsettling premise, and only gets more disturbing from there.

11. Cassandra Khaw - “Don’t Turn On The Lights”

We all know the story - a young woman goes into her flatmate’s room to borrow something, grabs what she needs from near the door without turning on the light, and heads out for the evening. Upon coming home, she discovers the mutilated body of her friend, and scrawled on the wall in blood the words “Aren’t you glad you didn’t turn on the light?”
    It’s an urban legend old enough that every generation since the invention of the electric light has probably had some version of it, and while it scared the shit out of us all as young children, it probably wouldn’t make for a very frightening story now, right? Wrong. Somehow, Cassandra Khaw manages to put an original spin on the tale, and makes it seem every bit as scary as when you first heard it in primary school. After reading this, you’ll want to sleep with the lamp left on.