I've already read most of John Langans, Clive Barkers, Stephen Kings and Laird Barrons stuff. Any reccomendations you guys have would be great, Short horror is my favorite genre of fiction.
The classic (make sure Stephen Gammel is the illustrator listed, not the modern replacement) Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series has some genuinely well made short horror stories and the charcoal pencil drawings that accompany them were so genuinely creepy that they were taken out in later editions because they freaked out and messed with some kids for years.
Like me. :scared:
There's three of them. The second one is called, I think, "More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark." The third one is "More Tales to Chill Your Bones."
I went vegetarian as a kid because I thought my parents were secretly going to feed me a human toe like in that one story. I had a weird anxious fixation on cannibalism for years and that is probably the root of it.
The Pale Lady terrified me so much as a kid that 20 years later I started crying in fear in the theater during the scene with her in the movie.
Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign by Amie Parnes and Jonathan Allen. Terrifying! :scared:
"Our Temporary Supervisor" by Thomas Ligotti is one of my favorites. Lines from it have stuck with me like "That's not necessary these days" and "The company is not accepting resignations at this time." It's one of those good short horror stories where there's a good mixture of unexplained dread and sudden panic.
"Distancia de rescate (Fever Dream)" by Samanta Schweblin is one I really liked too. It's a dying woman answering a series of increasingly bizarre questions from a boy poisoned by pesticides. I don't know how to explain the rest, it starts to become dreamlike
Other horror authors I've liked: Yoko Ogawa, Giorgio De Maria, and Robert Aickman
If you're not opposed to it, there's a good tradition of short form horror manga
Junji Ito has several collections of his work outside of the big names (Tomie, Gyo, Uzumaki), just look up Museum of Terror, it has at least a dozen volumes or so of stories (my personal favorite is The Thing that Washed Ashore)
Outside of Ito, there's a lot of other stuff, but I think a good place to start is an older book known as Fuan no Tane (translates to Seeds of Anxiety)
It's one you're going to have to find translations of online, but it's got some genuine creepy stuff that ranges the gamut from more traditional ghost stories to just out and out disturbing nightmares
IDK if that's the one, but also whichever collection has Guts in it
I enjoyed pretty much every story in M. J. Pack's Certain Dark Things. She wrote a lot on r/nosleep and just had a lot of heart to her stories.
Says she grew up on goosebumps and Stephen King in her bio on goodreads. Sounds right up my alley I will have to check it out.
Just glad it didn't say Harry Potter, or some shit.
the lottery and other short stories manages to really create an offputting and disturbing atmosphere where sometimes I found it hard to figure out what was scary about the situation described even though it was freaking me out
10/10 very spooky
