Short Horror

Bubba’s back from Fairyland, and sometimes it feels like they shoulda just stayed there! Man, coming back to the real world sucks. Bubba and his whole team have been fired on account of going MIA for a year and a half (yeah, time moves differently in Fairyland - yay), and now they’ve got to…get jobs? Oh, this is going to go well.

It was a killer year for horror fiction of the harder kind. Authors, editors, and publishers presented readers with some startling works of horrific imagination, stories graphic in the extreme yet with subtleties suggesting larger meanings, tales that explore humanity by plumbing depths of soulless inhumanity and, in some cases, outright depravity. The stories here represent the best of them, disturbing tales that dig deep and take you into the dark heart of horror itself, unrelenting and unapologetic.

Editors Randy Chandler and Cheryl Mullenax put the call out to horror writers and editors of extreme stories, the hardcore stuff that breaks boundaries and trashes taboos, the transgressive tales you can't "unread" (as Chuck Palahniuk says). Some of the stories you'll find here are loaded with very graphic descriptions of violence, sex, and depravities, while others may contain only one shocking moment of brutality. In others, the hardcore aspect may be less graphic and subtler than you might expect.

Thirty-four years ago, on October 31, poor Hannah Talbott took part in a scavenger hunt gone violently wrong. The mean girls made sure of it. To this day, for a haunted local mother, the most unsettling Halloween costume of all is an urban legend they call Hannah-Beast. It’s a reminder of the past she can’t forget. Especially tonight when it’s come back, so close to home.

Unexplained events are happening at Oxford these days. Several students have been attacked at night by some strange form of wild animal. It can scale walls with cat-like agility. Its arms are as thin and as strong as steel bands. And there is one student who conducts midnight studies in his room with certain Egyptian artifacts. The most significant of which is a 6'7" tall mummy.

We've all been to haunted house attractions on Halloween that have people made up to be scary-looking to scare us even though it is all fake, and we know it, but we don't care; we just want to be scared. Meet Henry Adams. He loves going to haunted attractions, but was getting bored and not scared anymore, so he decided he was going to make his own Haunted attraction that would be to die for - literally. Henry wanted to be the envy of all Halloween attractions, and he was going to do it in a deadly way.

LIMBUS, INC. is a shadowy employment agency that operates at the edge of the normal world. LIMBUS's employees are just as suspicious and ephemeral as the motives of the company, if indeed it could be called a company in the ordinary sense of the word. In this shared-world anthology, five heavy hitters from the dark worlds of horror, fantasy, and sci-fi pool their warped takes on the shadow organization that offers employment of the most unusual kind to those on the fringes of society.

Are vampires a bloodthirsty menace to mankind? Or simply misunderstood creatures struggling to survive? After hearing these six entertaining stories, you'll be able to decide for yourself. From the horrifying to the humorous, some of today's finest authors share stories about one of the oldest imagined evils, the vampire. From Tanith Lee's chilling story to Esther Friesner's comic tale of rival teens trying to best one another, these stories bring vampires to (un)life, in all their majesty and terror.

This collection contains three short stories: "The Vampire Hunter", "The Undead", and "The Gatekeeper".

From the number one best-selling author of The American Boy and The Ashes of London comes a collection of three Gothic novellas - Broken Voices, The Leper House and The Scratch - perfect for fans of The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley.

In The Dinosaur Tourist, Caitlín R. Kiernan’s 15th collection of short fiction, 19 tales of the unexpected and the uncanny explore that treacherous gulf between what we suppose the world to be and what might actually be waiting out beyond the edges of our day-to-day experience. A mirror may be a window into another time. A cat may be our salvation. Your lover may be a fabulous being. And a hitchhiker may turn out to be anyone at all.

Enjoy dark twists? Enjoy feeling the hairs on your arms tingle? Or the feeling that there’s someone, or something, behind you? Well, take a dive into ‘Time to Scream’, a collection of twenty five horror bites; short scary snacks that are sure to make you wince. From ghosts, to serial killers and even Death herself; there’s a little something for everyone. There’s a gruesome nightmare for everyone.

Estos cuentos de Horacio Quiroga nos siguen asombrando y despiertan engrandes y chicos la fascinación por lo desconocido, por más espantos o que sea. Es que se trata del horror cotidiano, real y conocido. Puede ser el que alberga un cómodo e inocente almohadón de plumas, los hermanos idiotas de una malcriada niñita, unos espectros que habitan las salas de cine o un insólito vampiro que, inexorablemente, terminará atrapando a su víctima. Historias para atesorar, para asombrarse y asustarse, como pasa siempre con la gran literatura de terror.

American Book Award-winning author Tananarive Due's second collection of stories ranges from horror to science fiction to suspense. From the mysterious, magical town of Gracetown to the aftermath of a pandemic to the reaches of the far future, Due's stories all share a sense of dread and fear balanced with heart and hope. In some of these stories, the monster is racism itself; others address the monster within, or other universal struggles set against the supernatural or surreal. All of them are written with Due's trademark attention to detail and deep characterization.

A WWI U-Boat attack strands a group of sailors on a mysterious landmass teeming with deadly scavengers. Quitting smoking turns out to be hazardous for your health, when a nicotine addict tries to break a shaman’s spell. And an FBI agent hot on the trail of a serial killer finds a string of terrifying clues, all leading to what he fears the most.

Acclaimed throughout the underground horror world, J.R. Hamantaschen’s stories push the boundaries and refuse to conform to the usual conventions. A mix of nihilism, cosmic horror, and weird fiction, this collection is a must-read for anyone who craves the dark and disturbing.

Andrew Sachs reads these four classic stories of suspense - "The Signalman" by Charles Dickens, "The Haunted Doll's House" by M. R. James, "The Room in the Tower" by E. F. Benson, and "The Bus-Conductor" by E. F. Benson. These spine-tingling tales, from the golden age of the ghost story, are sure to leave you with a creeping sense of dread.

The tale of a man who unwittingly angers a sorcerer, who is assumed by some Monty scholars to be based on the self-styled 'Great Beast,' occultist Aleister Crowley. Montague Rhodes James was a noted British mediaeval scholar and provost of King's College, Cambridge (1905–1918) and of Eton College (1918–1936). He is best remembered for his ghost stories which are widely regarded as among the finest in English literature.

The Fogg River Seminary, a girls’ school in a small Illinois town, is supposed to be just another stop on Maryse and Vasyl’s endless travels. They’ve made lucrative use of Maryse’s “foreign” looks in their melodramatic séance act—and an act is all it is. Then, during their performance, a blizzard sweeps in and cuts them off from town completely. In the freezing halls, there’s a voice speaking the secrets of the dead, and Maryse has no choice but to listen…because this time, the voice is real.

CONTENTS: A Suspicious Gift [Algernon Blackwood], Skeleton Lake: An Episode in Camp [Algernon Blackwood], The Wood of the Dead [Algernon Blackwood], A Baby Tramp [Ambrose Bierce], The Damned Thing [Ambrose Bierce], Dagon [H.P Lovecraft], The Horror of the Heights [Arthur Conan Doyle], The Descendant [H.P Lovecraft], The Cats of Ulthar [H.P Lovecraft], The Evil Clergyman [H.P Lovecraft], He [H.P Lovecraft], The Book [H.P Lovecraft], In the Vault [H.P Lovecraft], Nyarlathotep [H.P Lovecraft], Death and the Woman [Gertrude Atherton], The Striding Place [Gertrude Atherton].