Mr Lupescu is a strange horror story by Anthony Boucher. It’s about a young boy who comes up with an imaginary friend when his mother leaves his father for another man.
‘A Haunted House’, by Virginia Woolf, both is and is not a ghost story. In less than two pages of prose, Woolf explores, summons, and subverts the conventions of the ghost story, offering a modernist take on the genre. ‘A Haunted House’, which first appeared in Woolf’s 1921 short-story collection Monday or Tuesday.
“The Pit and the Pendulum” is a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe and first published in 1842 in the literary annual The Gift: A Christmas and New Year’s Present for 1843. The story is about the torments endured by a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition, though Poe skews historical facts. The narrator of the story describes his experience of being tortured. The story is especially effective at inspiring fear in the reader because of its heavy focus on the senses, such as sound, emphasizing its reality, unlike many of Poe’s stories which are aided by the supernatural. The traditional elements established in popular horror tales at the time are followed, but critical reception has been mixed. The tale has been adapted to film several times.
Carolyn Ashley Kizer (December 10, 1925 – October 9, 2014) was an American poet of the Pacific Northwest whose works reflect her feminism. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985.
An underrated classic and possibly Poe’s best horror story, this is about a man named William Wilson, who describes a disturbing encounter with his own doppelganger.
A man living in a small country hotel becomes obsessed with the only other permanent resident — a a strange pale man who inexplicably moves from room to room.
The Outsider — a strange, beautifully written tale about a man who finally escapes a dank castle where he has spent his entire life in isolation. It’s one of Lovecraft’s shortest stories, but also one of his most effective.
Inspired by the Burke and Hare murders of 1828, ‘The Body Snatcher’ is a gothic tale that follows two med students, involved in crimes of grave robbing, in order to keep their anatomy professor supplied with instructional cadavers.
