31 Great Horror Stories You Can Read for Free Online - Part 4

This was originally supposed to be a three-part series, but I haven’t had as much time to read as I would have liked (or, more accurately, I’ve been fucking lazy). So here’s the fourth and final installment of 31 Great Horror Stories You Can Read Online for Free.

26. Caitlin R Kiernan - Houses Under the Sea

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There’s an atmosphere of failure that suffuses this story, a malaise that seems to spread to the reader from the protagonist almost without you noticing; you feel the man’s failure, and the depression he feels at having been powerless to stop what happened to his lover (even while he is unsure of what exactly did happen to her). His internal landscape mirrors the drab, run-down seaside town in which the story takes place, and it’s a testament to Kiernan’s skill as a prose stylist that you never notice her trying to push that atmosphere on you - it happens as if by accident, seeping through the page like a communicable stain. 

    You’ll notice I haven’t said much about the story. That’s because the events of “Houses Under the Sea” are deliberately vague, and most of the clarifying detail comes near the end of the piece. To tell you as much as I without spoiling it, then, the unnamed narrator is recovering from a relationship with the leader of an ocean-worshipping cult. Read this if you like original takes on cosmic horror.

27. Caspian Gray - Centipede Heartbeat

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Centipedes, man. Fucking centipedes. There’s something uniquely creepy about anything that inhuman, especially once you read about species as long as your forearm that eat motherfucking bats. Caspian Gray takes full advantage of the creepiness of centipedes in this short story, and manages to wrong-foot the reader right at the very end - if you think you know what’s happening, prepare to be surprised. 

28. Jeff Vandermeer - No Breather in the World But Thee

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I won’t tell you what happens in this one, because I haven’t a clue. In any other writer’s hands, a piece of work like this could have ended up seeming pointlessly surreal, just weirdness for the sake of weirdness. Vandermeer, however, made me sympathise with the characters trapped in some unexplained Hell. The little bits of interior monologue we get from each character let the reader in just enough to feel their despair, and it’s that connection that pulls the story together.

29. Brit Mandelo - And Yet, Her Eyes

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I love it when a writer sneaks a positive note into a horror story, and I love it even more when a writer knows when to leave things unexplained. Brit Mandelo achieves both those things in a story that tells the audience as little as possible, because it doesn’t matter what exactly it is that Sasha brought back with her from Afghanistan; what matters is what it does, the effect it has on her relationship and her sense of self. Read this if you like horror with a personal touch.

30. Kaaren Warren - All You Can Do Is Breathe

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To me, this is a terrifying story because Warren personifies depression. She turns an abstract thing into a guy who steals everything about your life that matters - the colour, the joy, the reason you have to exist, Sometimes, the most frightening monsters are the real ones.

31. Howard Phillips Lovecraft - The Call of Cthullu

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Of course, I couldn’t finish the list without sticking in some Lovecraft, and what better example of his work than the one that gives us our most complete look at his most famous monster? If you’ve a horror fan, you probably know how this one goes already, so I’ll not bore you by rehashing it; if you’re new to Lovecraft, I won’t rob you of the experience of encountering him blind. Yeah, the guy was so racist that people thought he was too racist at a time when lynching was considered family entertainment - but he was also a damn good writer.

Well, there you have it - your horror stories for the rest of the month. Enjoy, and happy Hallowe’en!

The Ritual (2017)

I held off on seeing 2017’s The Ritual for longer than I should. Someone at my old job whose opinion I trusted told me that she hadn’t cared for it, so I decided to skip seeing it in the cinema. Fortunately, it came out on Netflix, so I was able to correct that decision earlier this year, and I’m glad I did. Written by Joe Barton, directed by David Bruckner and based on Adam Nevill’s 2011 novel,  The Ritual is a fantastic example of what I talked about in my Jaws post. Bruckner makes you feel every ounce of the characters' pain and fear, making this one of the most emotionally involved horror films of recent years.

    The film starts with five friends (Phil, Rob, Luke, Dom, and Hutch) on a night out, planning a holiday together. They can’t agree on where to go, and Rob’s suggestion of hiking in Sweden is quickly shot down. On the way back from the pub, Luke (the protagonist) and Rob stop by a shop, only to find that they’ve walked into the middle of a robbery. Luke hides behind some shelves, but Rob freezes; the robbers kill him when he refuses to give them his wedding ring. Luke blames himself for Rob’s death (even though it was kind of Rob’s fault), and his guilt and grief pervade the rest of the film.

    Six months after Rob’s murder, the four remaining friends decide to take the hiking trip he suggested, in honour of his memory, and while on the trail Dom slips and injures his knee. He’s too hurt to make the long walk to their destination (although some of the others suspect him of exaggerating his injury), but Hutch finds an alternative route that (he says) will take them to the same destination in half the time. The short cut involves trekking through dense forest, and once the men are under the canopy things go a bit Blair Witch. There are strange symbols carved into the trees, and the friends come upon the split and gutted carcass of an elk hanging in the trees. 

    Caught in a heavy rain, the men seek shelter in an abandoned cabin, where they find runes hanging from the rafters that match the symbols carved into the trees outside; worse, in the attic is a carved figure resembling a human, but with no head and antlers for hands. Still, between the creepy cabin and the pouring rain outside, the men all choose to stay there. 

    During the night, all four suffer horrific dreams, and Luke finds unexplained puncture wounds in his chest. Naturally, they get the fuck out of that cabin, and make their way deeper into the forest, figuring that the fastest way out at this point is through. 

    The following night, Hutch is taken from his tent, his screams waking the others; while searching the woods for him they become hopelessly lost, but decide to carry on without their gear rather than try to find their way back to the campsite. Not much later, they come upon Hutch’s body, displayed in the trees just as the elk had been earlier. 

    After this, the creature become more brazen, not waiting for the others to go to sleep to drag Phil away. Luke and Dom run for it and reach what they think is safety - a log cabin, this time occupied. The occupants, though, knock the two men unconscious, and they awake to find themselves tied up in a basement. 

    While the people who own the cabin are sacrificing Dom to their god (the creature that has been preying on the men), one of them visits Luke, and explains that the creature is a child of Loki, and that it grants immortality to those who worship it. The tribute it demands is human sacrifice. She offers Luke a choice - submit to the creature and join the cultists, or refuse and serve as a sacrifice. 

    Luke escapes after the woman leaves him alone to ponder his fate, and sets light to the cabin, using the fire as a distraction to flee into the forest. The monster pursues him and, when it catches up to him, forces him to his knees several times to try and make him worship it. Luke fights back using an axe he stole from the cabin, and creates an opening to run. He reaches the end of the treeline and turns back, expecting to find the creature bearing down on him, but it appears unable to leave the forest. It roars in frustration as he walks towards a nearby road.

The Ritual is a film about guilt, and redemption. Luke starts the film with a moment defined by fear - he crouches behind some shelves as the robbers menace his friend; he weighs the vodka bottle in his hand, deciding whether to fight, but instead stays where he is while Rob is murdered. This is not a decision we should judge him for - if he’d attacked the robbers, all that would likely have changed is that he would have died along with Rob. Someone who will kill you for a wedding ring is not someone who’ll be scared off easily. Still, Luke views it as a cowardly act, and it’s his perspective that’s important. Dom reminds him (and the audience) of this later in the film - when Luke blames Dom and his injury for their decision to leave the planned hiking route, Dom replies “No, we wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you.” He calls him a coward. When the creature is chasing Luke through the woods near the end of the film, it tries to break his spirit by sending him hallucinations of the night Rob died; throughout the film, Luke dreams of that moment, including during the night spent in the cabin. We are presented over and over again with the moment when Luke came to think of himself as a coward, and the final reminder comes moments before he stands up to a demi-god. He refuses to either worship the creature or be sacrificed to it. Either choise would have meant his journey ending in that forest - whether as a member of the cult, forbidden to ever leave, or as the last of his friends to die there. But by refusing to submit - by finding the courage to fight, even when any sane person would say it was hopeless - Luke escapes. 

    The filmmakers don’t show us what happens to Luke after he leaves the forest. He obviously would still be traumatised - you don't see your four closest friends murdered and just get over it - but the metaphor is clear enough: he was brought to a dark place by loss and weakness, and escaped through strength. 

I’ll return to The Ritual later in the month for a more review-y post, but that’s it for today.

Wrath James White - His Pain

This is going to be a bad review. I don’t mean a review where I say the book isn’t very good (although there is a lot to criticise about it) - I mean that, as a book review, this review will not be of high quality, because I don't know why I liked His Pain. I’ll try and give you an idea of what this book is, and I’ll critique it as well as I can, but I just don't know what it is White does that makes this novel so strangely satisfying.

Let’s start with what I do know. His Pain is a 2014 novel from Deadite Press, one of the most recognisable publishers in extreme horror. It concerns Jason, a boy born with a singular neurological condition that causes his brain to interpret every sensation as pain. Every taste, touch, smell, or sound gets twisted into agony by the disorder, and Jason spends his youth in an opiate haze, zipped into a sensory-deprivation bag at night and huddled in a hermetically sealed room during the day, until a mysterious yogi arrives, claiming that he can teach people to tolerate any degree of suffering through meditation. Needless to say, all doesn’t go according to plan.

As in the last review, I’ll go into the things I didn’t like first. Number one is the prose - like in Skins, the writing is mediocre at best and verging on unreadable at worst. The most irritating thing - and this is something that pisses me off whenever I see it - is that White is never content to write “he/she screamed”. Instead, we get this:

    “Aaaaaaeeeiiii! Oh God! I Can’t take it! Aaaaaarrgh!”

That’s the first line of dialogue in the book. Admittedly the first scene is Jason’s birth, and this is the kind of thing people probably say during childbirth, but an artist’s job is to improve on reality, not report it verbatim. There is no reason at all to try to onomatopoeise every character’s screams. Fortunately, there isn’t too much of that, but when it does happen it takes me right out of the story.

    Secondly, when things kick off, it happens far too quickly. We get an involving build-up to the yogi’s first hints of success with Jason, but then as soon as he’s taught the boy to tolerate the sound of his voice it feels as though White got bored and decided to jump straight to the action. In the space of ten pages or so we go from Yogi Arjunda beginning to help Jason master his senses, to Arjunda hiring a prostitute for Jason (he needs to “show him what pleasure is,” apparently). Then, Jason flips out and bites the woman’s face off and his dad’s reaction is to strangle her to death. There’s no agonising over that decision by the way, no moral conflict, no scene where Edward has to convince himself to kill in order to cover up his son’s madness - he sees that Jason has mutilated a hooker and his automatic response is ‘well, obviously I have to kill her now’. Then Jason’s parents matter-of-factly dismember the corpse, like a version of Shallow Grave where everyone involved is a psychopath. The frustrating thing is that the scenario White has created is genuinely promising. The characters are reasonably well fleshed out, the story is building at a good pace without seeming forced, and then it’s like someone flipped a switch and suddenly he’s fisting his mum to death. That odd, unreal feeling continues throughout the novel; people don't act the way people act.

    Obviously, it’s fiction, you can’t expect it to be 100% “realistic”, but there are certain rules you can’t break. No matter what the story, no matter how fantastical or surreal you want to make it, the rules of human behaviour stay the same - or, if you want to change them, there has to be a solid framework for the characters’ behaviour. This book fails on that level. 

Still, despite all this, I couldn’t put the book down. There’s something Wrath James White does that keeps me reading, no matter how flawed the book is. And when I got to the end, I found myself feeling good. I had spent the entire book criticising it, making a list of things to slag it off for on my blog, but none of that mattered - I liked this book. There was something about it that scratched an itch I didn;t know I had. His Pain is pulp, and it has all the drawbacks of pulp, but it’s damn good pulp. 

So there you have it - I don’t know why I had a good time reading His Pain, but maybe you will.

Pain On Screen - Jaws (1975)

I don't remember how old I was when I saw Jaws, but I was definitely too young, even in the eyes of the BBFC (Jaws is now rated 12A). I was at an age where the big fear with movie monsters was that they would eat you, and if they did that then you’d be dead; I was obviously aware that being eaten by a monster would probably hurt, but it wasn’t something I thought about. I probably worried about dying more than the average boy of primary school age, and it was that fear that drove horror for me. 

    I can remember the exact moment when that changed. It’s near the very end of the film, when Quint dies. The shark has his lower half in its mouth, and it’s slowly drawing him further in as the boat sinks. We get a close-up shot of Quint’s face as he screams, and blood pours from his mouth. I don't know how long that shot is, but in my memory of the film it’s probably more drawn-out than in reality. 

    I don't know what it was about that shot that got me - probably Robert Shaw’s acting - but for some reason that shot made me consider pain in a way I never had before. Up until then, pain was something that happened when you fell and scraped your knee, or got into a fight - you tried to avoid it when you could, but it wasn’t a grand fear like death or rabies (much like John Green, I was disproportionately afraid of rabies as a young child, especially considering we don't have rabies in the UK). Steven Spielberg changed that. Ever since seeing Jaws, I’ve been drawn to films and literature that focus on suffering, be it horror films like Tusk or the writing of Primo Levi. I haven’t seen Jaws since, but to this day I measure every horror film I see against Quint’s death.

Tusk (2014)

I seek to answer a question that has plagued mankind ever since we first crawled from the primordial ooze and stood erect in the sun: is man really a walrus after all?

With lines like that, you know you’re watching a Kevin Smith film. His unique sense of humour made him famous in films like Dogma and Clerks, and that’s pretty much all he’s known for. Given his reputation, one could be forgiven for thinking that he was a writer/director of irreverent comedies - an exceptionally talented one, of course, but nothing more. Watch Tusk, though, and you’ll see that he can do horror as well as the best of them.

    Tusk is a 2014 body horror/comedy starring Kevin Long, Haley Joel Osment, and the late great Michael Parks, inspired by an advert that Kevin Smith saw in a paper. The man who posted the ad wanted someone to live in his house for free - no rent, no bills, no nothing - so long as the person agreed to wear a walrus suit for a few hours each day. While wearing the suit, the person was to stay completely in character - acting like a walrus, making walrus noises instead of talking, and so on. Smith, being the twisted genius that he is, saw the potential for a body horror in what most people would see as wacky comedy material. What if, Smith thought, the person who posted the ad wanted more than a part-time walrus? What if he wanted to surgically transform the unfortunate person who responded to the ad into a walrus? 

    The film follows Justin Long as he travels to Canada to find a story for his podcast. The story he goes up there for falls through, but while he’s in a local pub he spots an advert placed by an old sailor, who’s looking for someone to listen to the stories he has from his time at sea. Thinking that this might make for a better podcast than what he originally came for, Long responds to the advert and drives out to see the old man at his remote house in the Canadian countryside. Then the guy drugs him and turns him into a walrus.

   

Body horror works on the same principle as haunted house horror. Your home is your castle - it’s a place that is yours and yours alone, where you are supposed to feel safe. Haunted house films and literature work by undermining that sense of security. 

    Your body is even more intimately yours than your house, and is much more closely tied to your sense of self, so the idea of your body being mutilated or changed in some horrible way is disturbing in a way that nothing else really can be. That’s the level on which the horror of Tusk works. 

    Tusk is one of the most affecting depictions of human misery that I’ve ever seen, and it’s genuinely hard to watch at times, which is what makes it all the more impressive that it’s fucking hilarious, too, and that neither element interferes with the other. You’ll cut from this brutal body horror, with a guy being mutilated and (literally) dehumanised in the most awful way possible, to a typical Kevin Smith scene with typical Kevin Smith characters, that will be so funny you’ll almost forget what you were just watching. 

    Not only does the comedy not interfere with the horror, I think that the reason Tusk is able to be so frightening is because it’s also funny. Let’s face it, a man getting turned into a walrus is a pretty ridiculous idea. But Tusk acknowledges that, and by acknowledging that its central premise is ridiculous, and incorporating that ridiculousness into the film, Smith was able to fully and unironically explore the horror of the concept, much like how an action-comedy like Hot Fuzz allows us to enjoy action cliches that we would otherwise deride by placing them in a parodic framework. We know it’s silly, and everyone else knows that we know it’s silly - so we can take it seriously. Irony as a Trojan horse for sincerity.

31 Great Horror Stories You Can Read Online for Free - Part 3

20. Joanna Parypinski - We Are Turning On A Spindle

http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/we-are-turning-on-a-spindle/

I don't know if this is horror or not, but it was published in Nightmare magazine, so it’s going on the list. I love stories that rework myths and/or fairy tales, and “We Are Turning On A Spindle” is a clever re-imagining of Sleeping Beauty written in that prose style that is particular to fairy tales. Parypinski combines horror, fantasy and speculative fiction into something that feels like you might stumble across it in a twisted children’s book.

21. Kelly Link - The Specialist’s Hat

https://kellylink.net/specialists-hat

I love stories that create their own off-beat fantasy creatures/worlds, the rules of which are never fully explained. We never learn who or what the Specialist is, what he does, or where he comes from - nor do we learn the babysitter’s backstory, or why she’s doing what she is doing. Link understands that a story can unfold through concealment as well as through revelation, and she builds an engaging and frightening world with what she doesn’t tell us.

22. Genevieve Valentine - Good Fences

Good Fences

This, to me, is a story about anxiety - about how frightening the outside world can be, whether there’s anything there to be frightened of or not. Like Kelly Link in her above story, Valentine explains as little as possible, leaving us to guess at what exactly is going on - the real story is behind the words. You’ll love this if you like stories driven by atmosphere and emotion rather than plot, and if you’re willing to go along with a significant amount of ambiguity without asking the writer to resolve it for you.

23. Sarah Langan - Afterlife

http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/afterlife/

I’m not sure if Sarah Langan is any relation to John Langan (it isn’t in her Nightmare Magazine bio, and I can’t be bothered to Yahoo it), and I haven’t read any John Langan in any case, so this sentence doesn;t really have any purpose. 

    This is one of those stories that is nominally horror, but really fits more into the category of fantasy - in this case, a deeply moving fantasy about stolen childhoods and lives missed out on. It’s a very quick read, but even in such little time Langan makes all her characters feel real. Even the protagonist’s dad, who we only glimpse momentarily, feels like a person with a life that we get a glimpse into, rather than just another plot detail. It’s difficult to do that, but Langan makes it look easy.

24. Caroline Diorio - The Planting Prayer

http://flashfictiononline.com/main/article/the-planting-prayer/

If you’ve been following this series, you’ll know that I like my horror short and nasty. Edgar Allen Poe advised that a writer of horror stories would do well to remove everything from their stories that did not contribute to the intended effect, and you can only really do that in very short fiction - the longer you have to stick with a story, the harder it is to keep it interesting without introducing something beyond one-dimensional horror. 

    Don't take that to mean that this flash story by Caroline Diorio is one-dimensional though - in addition to being creepy as fuck, it’s surreal and strangely beautiful, with a fictional world vivid and imaginative enough to sustain a novel. If you (like me) thought that there was nothing new to be done with zombies, prepare to be surprised.

25. Desirina Boskovich - Construction Project

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Here’s the creepiest thing about this story, to me at least: it’s told in the first person, and the narrator is clearly a part of the couple who are the story’s only characters, but the narrator refers to both Eli and Sarah in the third person. That, and the fact that we get almost no details on what “the beast” is, gives Boskovich’s story an unsettling atmosphere, like you never know quite where the danger is coming from. The prose will appeal to Angela Carter fans. 

Threads (1984)

I am become death, destroyer of worlds.

• J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoting from the Bhagavad Gita

Ok. Threads. Oh, my God Threads. Seriously, if you think you've seen it all – if you think you've seen every horrifying film under the sun, and there's nothing cinema can throw at you any more – watch this. Because believe me, this beats everything else. A Serbian Film, Funny Games, Hostel, whatever – they aren't shit next to this. I mean, those films aren't shit in general, but even just in terms of being a truly, truly grueling experience, Threads makes the nastiest piece of torture porn look like Thomas the Tank Engine. And the most remarkable thing is that it does it with barely any gore. Threads manages to be ten times as horrifying as any of the Saw films without resorting to any of the cheap shock tactics those films employ. 

Alright, I'll back up a bit. Threads is a 1984 BBC television drama directed by Mick Jackson, who also directed The Bodyguard. It's essentially a drama depicting what the results of a nuclear war would look like, and it is every bit as brutal as it sounds. The thing is that it's not a post-apocalyptic film in the standard Hollywood style. Those films are all optimistic in one way or another – even in The Road, which is the obvious point of comparison, the horror is balanced out with aesthetics. In the book you have the majesty of Cormac McCarthy's prose, and in the film you've got the visuals that kind of have the same quality as the descriptions in the book, these huge landscapes that are devastated but still somehow beautiful. You get none of that in Threads. What you have instead is a detached, almost documentary-style film about a nuclear holocaust. And it is the hardest thing that I've ever had to watch. Just on a purely emotional level, the horror that these characters experience, and the lack of hope, is really draining on the viewer. This is one of those films where at the end of it you feel like you've gone through something. Part of what creates that effect is the way the film drags. With most post-apocalyptic films, you get a quick introduction to the characters, and then the big catastrophe happens within twenty or thirty minutes. In Threads, it takes three quarters of an hour, and for that whole time it seems inevitable, partly because you already know what the film's about, but also because of the way the story's told. The writer really gives the impression that there's no way out for these characters, that they're completely and utterly fucked. Another thing that really marks Threads out is the way it focuses on the characters. When you see ruined buildings in this film you're not seeing these big, special-effects landscapes designed to impress you; you're seeing through the eyes of the people who've lived in those buildings, who built their lives around them. The emphasis isn't on how cool it looks when a city gets blown up, it's on how awful it is to live in a city that gets blown up. 

Ultimately I don't know if I can recommend this, just because it is so bleak, and so punishing, and there's really no pay-off. Threads was made at a time when nuclear war was a real threat, with the purpose of convincing people that nuclear war had to be avoided at all costs. So, it makes sense on a functional level for it to be one hundred and twelve minutes of unrelenting suffering, but it does make for a pretty unrewarding watch.