King sold ‘Salem’s Lot for an outstanding sum by today’s standards, let alone 1975’s, and never let up from there. Short and direct. Comments and feedback are … Fourteen-year-old Marjorie Barrett starts displaying signs of schizophrenia, or maybe it’s just teenage rebellion…or maybe it’s something more. Communication is important. It suggests a possibility that people of that era were more comfortable rejecting rather than considering. Whereas Tampa introduced an admitted predator from the first page, Conlon takes care to build a believable case for how Mona justifies her taboo actions, even as her control of the situation—and her sanity—slip out of her grasp. Okorafor is a wonderful storyteller, and if you’ve never read her books, this would be a great place to start. Jackson's dramatic and suspenseful short story. We create our own monsters. We have got few scary stories from Reddit that will make you hold your breath. I was shocked by how good and complex his writing was. The labyrinthine structure of this tome (over 700 pages) constantly calls into question the sanity of not just the protagonists, but of the person flipping the pages, too. I classify this one under, One of the early American classics, and don't forget its famous companion, All three of these stories are important examples of Hawthorne's contribution to the genre of Dark Romanticism, and should be read.

Blatty’s text has the time and space to better establish all of its key players, specifically Father Damien Karras, layering on the dread long before the pea soup starts flying. A naïve young woman falls for a handsome, older widower, and agrees to become his bride after only a brief courtship. There’s also an intimacy present in the novel that the movie keeps at arm’s length, to the point that you genuinely worry for widower Aoyama during the infamously shocking climax. Want more short stories? If you read all of these stories, you will have a strong grasp of various short story styles from famous stories to horror to romance to classics and more. It’s always stayed with me. appearances, and easily could have qualified for a few more; another has written just one novel during his decades-long career. —Steve Foxe, The story within a story in House of Leaves would have been unsettling enough: a family moves into a house and slowly discovers that the inside is somehow larger than the outside. LaValle wrings dread out of Pepper and his fellow inmates’ helplessness, sticking to Jackson’s level of unease instead of attempting all-out terror.

I had no idea that the movie The Arrival was based on one of his short stories. Readers expecting the nonstop scares of creepy abstract video imagery may feel let down, but Suzuki’s novel is a fascinating milestone in Japanese horror fiction. HuffPost is part of Verizon Media. Both stories satisfied a reading itch I needed scratched.