Five Horror Short Story Collections That Aren't My Favorites

Horror: (from the OED Online)

A painful emotion compounded of loathing and fear; a shuddering with terror and repugnance; strong aversion mingled with dread; the feeling excited by something shocking or frightful. Also in weaker sense, intense dislike or repugnance. (The prevalent use at all times.)

I strongly believe horror, as a genre, works best at the short story level. I've probably expounded on this before, but, wait, I'm going to again. It's a masterful novel that can maintain the suspense, fear, and atmosphere to deliver a good, unnerving chill to the marrow. Unfortunately, while I've read many very good horror novels (see this post), but, man, oh Manischewitz, I've read way more terrible, or just plain crappy, ones.

On the other hand, I've read great stories from mediocre novelists. Like a nightmare, a story only needs a little time to get in there and drive a spike into your brain or leach poison into your soul. No matter how lunatic the setup is, if it only last a dozen pages, it doesn't have to be able to hold up to deep scrutiny. If you want an evil, winking planet, you can do it ("The Tugging" by Ramsey Campbell). Short fiction is where the horror can run its freest and wildest.

In A Lonely Place (1983) by Karl Edward Wagner

It's been some time since I've read all of this nigh-perfect collection, but enough memories of the best stories in remain so I feel confident in writing about it. Wagner is probably best remembered as an editor of tremendous talent and a writer of topnotch swords & sorcery tales. What he also was, was a very, very good horror writer. If you don't believe me, just look up how many times "Where the Summer Ends" and "Sticks" have been anthologized. Wagner wrote more stories than the seven included in this volume, but these are the ones with which to start.

The Inhabitants of the Lake & Other Less Welcome Tenants (1964) by Ramsey Campbell
What can I say, I love this one, it's an absolute blast. Ramsey Campbell, one of the most respected names in horror, began, as most genre writers do, as a fan. Before he was a teenager, inspired by ghost stories he had read he turned his hand to writing his own. Later, as a teenager, he wrote Cthulhu Mythos tales that strove to be spitting images of HPL's own. At August Derleth's suggestion, Campbell rewrote them in an English setting. In 1964, at the age of eighteen, Arkham House published, Inhabitants, Campbell's first collection.

Replete with creepy, inbred denizens of spiritually corrupt towns, unwholesome tomes, and new Mythos deities of his own devising, these stories are an absolute hoot. Lin Carter tried to do the same thing in his Mythos stories, but they are mostly failures. I think the difference is, ultimately, even at a young age, Campbell was just a better writer and Carter never got that it was atmosphere more than demonic genealogies and lists of tomes that make these sort of stories work. Now, these stories are no great works of art, but Campbell knew for them to work their needed to be discomfiting, to be disturbing. The urban decay and moral rot that's a major part of Campbell's later, non-Mythos, writing can already be found in some of these early stories.


Owls Hoot in the Daytime and Other Omens (2003) by Manly Wade Wellman

This isn't the first and it probably won't be the last collection of Manly Wade Wellman's John the Balladeer stories, but it's the one I have. For those uninitiated to the wondrous magic of Wellman's yarns, these are essentially paranormal detective stories. Instead of fog-shrouded cities, they're set among the deep hollows and mountains of Appalachia and are filled with bits of real (and invented) rural folklore.

I have no memory of when I first encountered Wellman and his stories. It might have been the story "Owls Hoot in the Daytime" itself. It first appeared in Kirby McCauley's terrific anthology, Dark Forces, but I can't swear to it. However I found him, I became a fan years ago and find myself dipping back into his stories regularly. I like them all, but it's the John stories I find drawn back to most often.



Night Shift (1978) by Stephen King

What can I say except that this is the book, more than any other, which made me a lifelong Stephen King fan? I like many of his novels and collections, but the only one other than The Shining that I've read multiple times is this. I've read it maybe half a dozen times over the years, all at once or in bits and pieces. Including "Quitters, Inc.," "The Children of the Corn," and "Night Shift," this collects more of King's truly great stories than any of the other collections published over the years. Vampires, aliens, Lovecraftian horror, King leaves practically no horror stone unturned and it's a blast.

Looking at the table of contents, I was almost shocked at just how many of the stories in Night Shift have been filmed - eleven as standalone or parts of anthology films or tv-miniseries  and several more as non-professional shorts (the latter as part of a deal where King allowed student and amateur directors license stories for a dollar). Most of the films stink, but I'd be curious just how much King has profited from this single forty-one year old story collection. Whatever, if you aren't a King reader but are curious, this is still the best place to start.


Nocturnes (2004) by John Connolly

I discovered John Connolly through the Kevin Costner horror movie, The New Daughter (2009). The movie is not bad, if not great, still some things about it - the inevitability of its conclusion particularly - lodged themselves in my brain and wouldn't let go. When I discovered the movie was based on a story by someone named John Connolly, I decided to get a copy. A quick search brought me to Nocturnes. Since then, I've read nineteen books of Connolly's, seventeen of them part of a series, and not one has disappointed me.


From the King-like "The Cancer Cowboy Rides Again," to the MR James-like "Mr Pettinger's Dæmon," to the supernatural detective novella, "The Reflecting Eye." this book supplies all the chills and shudders I want from horror stories. Nine of the fifteen stories began as a radio scripts and that shows in their ghost-story-around-the-fireplace feel. I wrote a standalone post about the collection when I first found it that you can read HERE. I only describe the stories above as "like" King or James to give you a sense of what they're like. Connolly doesn't hide his influences, but he is not pasticheur. He writes with an authority and eloquence that verges into the poetic many, many times, and its all his own.

The best thing to come out of discovering Connolly was finding his series character, Charlie Parker. Again, I've written about the books HERE. I cannot recommend them enough.

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I could write a dozen posts about another sixty collections I've loved over the decades, but these five are among the very best and among the ones I've gone back to again and again. Not every story in any of them is perfect. Some are even bad, still each of these contains among some of the very best spooky writing from the last half century.

Haunting Short Story Collections

The best horror comes in small doses. Just like that harsh creak in the night becomes some skeletal prowler in our imaginations and just the sound of an old house settling, an author's darkest terror can fade away into nothing when exposed to the harsh light of five hundred pages of storytelling. Restricted to the confines of a ten or forty pages, and that terror will leave you feeling there's something wrong with the universe or something's lurking just outside of your peripheral vision, waiting for you to make a false move. Just think about some of the most famous and best names in horror - Machen, James, Blackwood, and Lovecraft are all known best for their short stories.

As I described in the previous post, horror took a turn toward novels in the seventies that continues to this day. The general turn away from short stories in publishing only accelerated that trend. Today, though, some of the best horror is once again found in short stories. Laird Barron has written a few novels, and they're good. His stories, though, are among the finest, most unsettling weird stories I have ever read.

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The children's librarian at the Stapleton Library, Miss Herz, knew exactly what kids wanted to read. Alongside all the books that we needed for school papers, book reports, or that our parents thought we should read, were Andre Norton, Robert A. Heinlein, and collections of scary stories. There were a bunch of different books, but there's only one I have any memories of: Witches, Witches, Witches, edited by Helen Hoke. I haven't seen a copy of this in years, but I remember it being pretty frightening. If the few interior illustrations I've been able to find it might still provide a little jolt of terror. Unfortunately, other than finding someone posts saying it holds a mix of fairy tales and legends, I have no idea what is actually in the book. I'd like to find out more, because they were some of the very first scary stories I ever read.

There are tons and tons of horror anthologies and single-author collections. Just looking at my e-book library, I've bought a stack of collections over the past few years that I'd never read before. Among them are four collections by Brian Lumley, three collections by Laird Barron (and one top-notch tribute collection inspired by Barron), Voodoo Tales: the Ghost Stories of Henry S. Whitehead, The Dead of Night: The Ghost Stories of Oliver Onions, and the monumental The Weird, edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer.

The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (2012)

This book is a monster - in its effort to explore a century's worth of weird stories, it's 1153 pages long and has 110 stories and novellas. The VanderMeer's goal was to show the evolution of weird fiction over that span. While it includes horror, weird, as they define it, is more than just haunts and ghouls. Looking to the Old Man of Providence, the VanderMeers have this to say:

A 'weird tale', as defined by H.P. Lovecraft in his nonfiction writing and given early sanctuary within the pages of magazines like Weird Tales (est. 1923) is a story that has a supernatural element but does not fall into the category of traditional ghost story or Gothic tale, both popular in the 1800s. As Lovecraft wrote in 1927, the weird tale 'has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains'. Instead, it represents the pursuit of some indefinable and perhaps maddeningly unreachable understanding of the world beyond the mundane - a 'certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread' or 'malign and particular suspension or defeat of...fixed laws of Nature' through fiction that comes from the more unsettling, shadowy side of the fantastical tradition.

I wasn't sure what to expect from this, and it sure as heck surprised me. In the early years, there're plenty of classic stories, like HPL's "The Dunwich Horror" and Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows, there's also less genre-bound things like Franz Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" and Jorge Luis Borges' "The Aleph". As the collection progresses down the century, the tendency is towards authors less and less beholden to the pulp tradition, and for want of better terms, more to literary or experimental writing. So, while Laird Barron and T.M Wright are included, so are Ben Okri and Haruki Murakami.

This is an amazing book, and not just because dozens of these authors and stories were completely new to me. The VanderMeers set out to survey the evolution of not a genre, but a style. Recently, Raphael Ordonez wrote: 

"a genre is a dead thing, a pigeonhole in a commercial classification system depending on the presence or absence of various material elements."

That is exactly what The Weird rejects utterly. This book is filled with the scary, the creepy, the mad, and the bizarre. Like the book coming up, this should be part of any horror reader's library.

Dark Forces, edited by Kirby McCauley (1980)

I can't emphasize how important the late and lamented, at least by me, Barrett Book Trader on Staten Island was to me. It opened sometime in the mid-seventies and remained so until the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century. In my youth, the only thing I cared about was it great, double-stacked sci-fi and fantasy section. As my tastes widened, I discovered the equally good mystery and literature sections. 

Thinking back, though, my favorite section was the horror section. It was located at the very back of the store, perhaps to keep the folks browsing the romance shelves from coming across the bloody skulls and creepy children on horror covers. I reveled in those stacks of gore-dripping drenched. That's where I discovered Robert Bloch, Ramsey Campbell, Hugh B. Cave, and many others. It's also where I discovered a battered and worn copy of Kirby McCauley's Dark Forces.

McCauley was a superstar agent, repping authors like Roger Zelazny, George R.R. Martin, and most significantly here, Stephen King. With Dark Forces, he planned to create an anthology for horror that would possess the "same scope and dynamism" of Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions (1967). The latter was a collection of original speculative fiction stories by a diverse crowd of writers, ranging from old hands like Robert Bloch and Frederik Pohl to up and comers like Larry Niven and Roger Zelazny. 

To achieve that goal, McCauley approached "every living writer who had tried his or her hand at this type of story." Many were unable to respond, by time or a lack of inspiration. In the end, though, he snagged twenty-three contributions from Stephen King, Gene Wolfe, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Robert Aickman, and nineteen other true greats. 

This is a book I love, and I write that while admitting there are some stories in it I have read only once, when I first bought it. On the other hand, Stephen King's "The Mist", T.E.D. Klein's "Children of the Kingdom", and Dennis Etchison's "Night Shift" and Karl Edward Wagner's "Where The Summer Ends" are stories indelibly stained on my brain. Again, if you read horror and have any degree of self respect, you should own this. I myself have a battered old paperback, but discovering the e-book is only $4.99, just bought that too.

Other collections like these worth finding are the late David G. Hartwell's two lengthy genre surveys: The Dark Descent (1987) and Foundations of Fear (1992). Both are excellent, and thick, collections of stories stretching from around the mid-19th century to the late 20th.

Two I want, having only read library copies of once, are the Boris Karloff edited Tales of Terror and And The Darkness Falls. Tales he edited chose and edited himself. According to an essay by David Hartwell, for Darkness, M. Edmund Spears sent Karloff a huge stack of stories to read. Karloff, while on tour with Arsenic and Old Lace, selected sixty-nine. Sure, it's a bit of clever marketing, but these are really good collections.

In A Lonely Place (1983) by Karl Edward Wagner

While Wagner is well known for his Kane swords & sorcery stories, he wrote some of the best horror tales of the last century. If you need proof of that, this is where to go. This single, slim book holds all of Wagner's very best horror stories. Along with the Oliver Onions-inspired "In the Pines," there's the urban terror of "Where the Summer Ends," the Lovecraftian "Sticks," the paranoid of "The Fourth Seal" along with three other great stories.

I bought this at the Manhattan Forbidden Planet during college. I had already read "Where the Summer Ends" in Dark Forces, but I all the rest were totally new to me. Since then, I've probably read this a half dozen times and picked it up and read a story or two at random another half-dozen times.

Wagner is one of the most important figures in 20th horror. As a writer, he was one of the best. As the editor of The Year's Best Horror for DAW for fifteen years, he was as important to the genre as Lin Carter had been for fantasy. According to his forwards, Wagner scoured every pro, semi-pro, and fanzine he could find for each volume's contents. When big novels dominated the field, were a reminder of the power of short stories. Sadly, I lost my copies to basement flooding.

There are too many single author collections to mention them all. From contemporary authors, all of Laird Barron's collections are good, but as it's got the deeply unsettling "The Men from Porlock," I suggest you check out The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All (2013) first.

From older authors, Hugh B. Cave's Murgunstrumm and Others (1977) is a must-own. As the magazine market for horror shorts had dried up, by the late sixties Cave had retreated from the field. In the early seventies, Karl Edward Wagner and David Drake established Carcosa Press, and as a labor of love published this massive collection of twenty-six stories. Not only did it remind the world of Cave's existence, it revived his career as a horror writer, and he wrote nearly a dozen novels and dozens of stories between its publications and his death in 2004.

I have a full set of the S.T. Joshi edited, late 80s Arkham House Lovecraft collections. Together, the four books include all of HPL's original stories and revisions he did for others.

There's a special place in my heart, though, for the very first collection of Lovecraft stories I ever read: The Shadow Over Innsmouth and Other Stories of Horror (1971). It was actually published by Scholastic Books. It's a haphazard mix of good stories ("The Colour Out of Space" and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth") and lesser ones ("The Transition of Juan Romero" and "The Festival"), but between nostalgia and the cover, I'm glad to have a copy of this on my shelves.

Stephen King reputation rests on his novels, but he started as a short story writer. His first collection, Night Shift (1978) is chock full of greats (as well as being the source material for several nigh unwatchable films - The Mangler, Children of the Corn, Lawnmower Man, and Maximum Overdrive) that have held up to multiple rereadings. His second collection, Skeleton Crew (1985), is equally good. Later collections are more hit or miss, but never without their gems.

One of the coolest things about the e-book revolution is the availability of free versions of public domain books. Twenty years ago, I searched high and low before I found an overpriced paperback copy. Now, along with Algernon Blackwood, M.R. James, and Robert W. Chambers (and many, many others), you can get most of his work for free. Same for the more literary ghost stories of Henry James and Edith Wharton.

That's plenty of stories that should carry you through the Halloween season and beyond. And they don't even scratch the surface. Let me know what collections you find yourself reaching for each year when the temperatures cool down, the leaves turn, and the air fills with the vile smell of manufactured pumpkin spice.

Halloween Night

After watching a mostly not-too-spooky movies for most of the month, the luminous Mrs. V. and I will send the holiday out in style with a few creepier films. The highlight will be The Haunting, Robert Wise's effective adaptation of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House.

If there's time, we'll also watch Donnie Darko and Halloween. The latter was the first horror movie I saw in the theater and I remember it scaring the heck out of me. Even knowing it inside out it can still give me chills if I let it (and I will).

Writing this, I'm thinking about what other spooky movies I need to get my hands on. First, The Innocents, a 1961 version of Henry James' "Turn of the Screw" and William Archibald's stage adaptation of the novella.

Then I need to get my hands on the original Universal Lon Chaney Jr.-starring The Wolfman. It's not a perfect film but Chaney's Talbot is great and I'm a big Claude Rains fan (sadly, how many people can say that these days?)

I should also get good copies of all the Frankenstein movies. I hadn't watched all three in years. The first two are beautiful, channeling all sorts of German Expressionist film techniques and really introducing Boris Karloff to the world.

So have a fun Halloween and don't eat too much crap.