As soon as the sticky summer air begins to dissipate and the first leaves transition into fiery reds and oranges, my instant desire is to cozy up with all things eerie and haunted. The winter holidays full of family, food, and chaos are imminent, but in this moment, I crave the youthful nostalgia of Halloween stories.
While many of us turn to films and TV for jump scares or trick-or-treaters creeping in the shadows, don’t overlook the suspense that awaits through a written tale—like a hand slowly reaching out beneath the lines or a set of dark beady eyes watching you from the corners of the page. This Halloween, get lost in these stories and poems of dark woods, family histories, and lovers long gone from the archives of Recommended Reading and The Commuter.
In these tales, language gives way to imagination. Some prose uncanny, some more sinister, others eerie pleasures. Let these stories carry you into the dark nights of winter’s approach. Grab an extra blanket and light the fire to ease the chill in your bones. Or let it creep up your spine and bask in the thrill just a little longer as Halloween inches closer.
We have something for all to enjoy.
“Good Night, Sleep Tight” by Brian Evenson
“Good Night, Sleep Tight” is the perfect eerie and mysterious bedtime story for those unafraid of the monsters who live under the bed or hide in the closet. Sometimes the unsettling and uncanny is right beside us, in the people we trust to tuck us in for the night. In this short story, Brian Evenson’s narrator recounts the cozy bedtime stories his mother told him as a child. Yet, every now and then she’d return to his bedroom with a frightening one. Now as he, his wife, and son plan for a visit to his old childhood home to spend the weekend with his mother, he can’t help but worry those scary stories might be passed onto his own child. He’s forced to confront the truths and tales he’s long ignored from his childhood.
“The Dirty Kid” by Mariana Enriquez
Mariana Enriquez is known for her Latin American Gothic and horror short stories, so it’s no surprise that what might seem like a tale of crime in “The Dirty Kid” is far beyond a typical missing child. The story opens with a childhood home taken over by age and wear, pulling the reader into the perfect setting for a spooky tale. The neighborhood adds to the eeriness, as it was once inhabited by the Argentinian aristocrats who, centuries ago, fled the yellow fever epidemic, leaving their mansions empty. The large mansions decorated with gargoyles and ornate details rose up across the now desolate neighborhood. The neighborhood is overcome with rotting homes, faltering businesses, thieves and the unhoused. The narrator does not wish to abandon her family home, but when the homeless woman and child who live outside her door go missing, she begins to wonder if supernatural forces might be at play.
“Tiptoe” by Laird Barron
There is just something perfectly creepy about stories that follow adult characters returning to events from their childhood, especially when they’re left wondering if the people they’ve always known and loved are as they appear. In “Tiptoe” Laird Barron disarmingly exposes the animalistic nature which manifests within human desires. We’re taken back to a multifamily camping trip as the narrator searches for answers for a condition he’s experiencing, certain his wholesome childhood hasn’t left him with any traumas. The fright in this short story isn’t around the campfire, but instead resides deep in the woods and tiptoes ever so slowly to the reader.
“King of All Hogs” by JG Lynas
The middle of nowhere, an isolated farm house occupied by an older couple, a decrepit barn, a phone that keeps ringing—the ultimate formula of horror. In the short story “King of All Hogs,” the narrator and her boyfriend, Mark, seek out a small pig farm that Mark discovered on an online forum. From the start, the reader senses that the relationship itself is strange: built on an unsteady infatuation. Things only get weirder and more layered once they arrive at the farm and invite themselves to stay for dinner. What’s hiding in the barn? Are any characters trustworthy? Who’s on the other end of the phone?
“Hannah-Beast” by Jennifer McMahon
It’s Halloween night, kids are in costumes, homes are decorated with jack-o-lanterns and ghoulish delights. Thirteen-year-old Erin is all dressed and ready to go trick-or-treating with her friends when her mom, Amanda, scolds her for her costume, the Hannah-beast: thick blue face paint, a colorful clown wig, a silver cape. Erin doesn’t care that Hannah-beast was once worn by a local girl with a story that haunts their town, that’s part of the thrill. She’s resentful of her mother’s rules, unaware that Amanda’s overbearingness is more than parental concern. Jennifer McMahon shows readers how horrors of the past surface as she weaves through time in “Hannah-Beast.”
“The Bone Friend” by Zebbie Watson
In this flash fiction, Zebbie Watson spins a tale of the dead full of whimsy and longing. When a teenage girl unearths a body of bones, she decides to date him. The story is told through the point of view of the skeleton as he tries to fit into this new world but wonders about his history and who he was before he became an array of decayed bones. The story unfolds in beautiful poetic prose that leaves a melancholy ache in the reader.
“Fucking Ghosts!” by Hannah Gregory
Sometimes Halloween stories offer us ghostly themes and spectral backdrops overtaken by love or humor. In the flash piece, “Fucking Ghosts!” we get an ominous tale that morphs into something more quirky and fun. Hannah Gregory gives us a narrator that can’t shake her old lover who still visits her every October, and she finds herself masturbating in bar bathrooms anytime she feels a cold draft down her neck. She keeps her haunting sex life a secret from everyone until she meets someone who understands the heartache of losing a partner and going back to them even after they’re dead.
“The Bone Hermit” by Lyndsey Croal
“The Bone Hermit” is a haunting piece of flash fiction that leaves a lingering chill. It raises a creepy crawling feeling as a hermit crab inhabits the bones of the narrator’s deceased husband. While she thought she tucked the body safely away in a cove off the shore, the crab makes a home in the carcass and pieces of his body begin to show up outside her window, the crab peeking through the skull’s hollowed eyes.
“I Pray in Screamers House of Horrors” by Domenica Martinello
“I Pray in the Screamers House of Horrors” is the first poem in a set of poems by Domenica Martinello, where hope is born in a house of horrors. The poignant and visceral language captures scenes of addiction and healing from the narrator’s life, and makes the reader feel trapped, choking, searching for an escape, leaving one wondering if the light at the end of the tunnel is an illusion of warmth or more gnawing terror.
The post Our Favorite Short Stories, Flash Fiction, and Poetry to Read for Halloween appeared first on Electric Literature.