“Grandfather used to say, ‘When we make our cursed fetishes, it’s important that they’re pretty.’”
Bora Chung is probably the scariest writer I have ever read: her stories are rooted in South Korean culture, both old and new, and are visceral, horrifying and somehow also funny. This one’s great.
Collected in Cursed Bunny, Honford Star, 2021
“The children were always called Blue-Eyes and the Turkey…”
Just thinking about this story makes me upset. Actually reading it is something I can do only every year or so. The most frightening fairy tale of all time? Definitely.
First published in The Anyhow Stories, Moral and Otherwise, Macmillan, 1882
“The photon storm struck without warning.”
I read a lot of scifi anthologies as a teenager (more on that later) and some of the stories in them have stayed with me all my life, even though I had forgotten the names of the authors and the stories (more on that later, too). So when I came across ‘Specialist’ again, I was very happy indeed. A vintage science fiction story about co-operation and hope, it’s just gorgeous.
First published in 1953 and collected in Untouched by Human Hands, Ballantine, 1954; reprinted by Penguin in 2021. Widely collected and anthologised, including in The Golden Age of Science Fiction, edited by Kingsley Amis, Hutchinson, 1981
“It is good to be spurred on with hope.”
NF Simpson is the greatest surrealist writer of all time: his plays, films, and TV shows were both philosophically brilliant and really, really funny. This short piece, a monologue from 1977, is mostly about getting lost in the snow, but in a way that suggests Kafka at his funniest.
First performed on BBC2’s Closedown in 1977. Collected in Most Of What Follows Is A Complete Waste of Time, Oberon, 2013
“Let us read Little Dorrit again. There are passages in that book I can never hear without the temptation to weep.”
Maybe this is the most horrible story of all time. It makes my throat close up whenever I read it. Waugh liked it so much he stuck it in his novel A Handful of Dust. Terrifying.
First published in Hearst’s International combined with Cosmopolitan, September 1933. Collected in The Complete Short Stories, Penguin, 2010. Also integrated into A Handful of Dust, Chapman & Hall, 1934, widely reprinted
“It is a wine of virtuous power…”
I could have made this a list entirely of John Wyndham stories, and ten times longer too: I love his work. The short stories, mostly written for American pulps, are particularly good. ‘Wild Flower’ is more lyrical than most, and it is both beautiful and full of melancholy.
Collected in The Seeds of Time, Michael Joseph, 1956; new edition from Penguin, 2014
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As I said above, I used to read a lot of scifi anthologies, and I used to forget what the stories were called and who wrote them: and so it is with this story. I remember the plot – a man lives in a literal nightmare world where freakish and murderous creatures are everywhere, and his only escape is in sleep, where he dreams that he lives in a normal, dull world exactly like our own. I was so obsessed with finding this story that I seriously considered writing it again, myself: I didn’t, but the thought gave me the idea for my novel, All My Colors.
(If you know what the story is, by the way, please let me know. I will be disappointed and delighted.)
Each Christmas Eve, M. R. James would invite friends, colleagues and students to his rooms at Cambridge where they would gather and socialise. At some point, James would rise and move from candle to candle, extinguishing them until only one remained. By this point his assembled guests would have fallen silent. James would sit by the single candle and read aloud his latest ghost story.
Ghost stories are one of the purest forms of storytelling we have. Although many recognise the tradition as going back to the Victorian era into which James was born, their origins lie much further back in human history. There are ghosts found in Shakespeare, in the writings of Pliny the Younger, in The Epic of Gilgamesh, in the Old Testament, and presumably in countless stories shared orally to another during the pre-written age. Collectively, these tales map out our primal fascination with the unknown and the malevolent.
It’s perhaps not surprising that ghost stories have also developed a strong connection to winter: the long nights seem to demand these tales, inviting listeners to huddle closer by the fire and imagine the terrors that lurk out there, unseen in the darkness.
This Christmas I have put together Ghosts at the Old Library, a project I created via Levenshulme Old Library, an arts charity I work for in Levenshulme, South Manchester, housed in the local former library building built in 1904. I commissioned six authors to each write a ghost story inspired by a landmark in the local area. These have been published individually and recorded for broadcast on ALLFM, our local community radio station, and will be released as podcasts on Spotify over the Christmas period. But the central aspect of the project has been a series of events where audiences are led from one space within the building to another, hearing each story read in full by lantern-light. Science, technology and lighting may have advanced a good deal since M.R. James first sat down to read his ghost stories, but the allure of a tale of dread and woe told in darkness feels timeless.
In the lead-up to this project, myself and the authors involved had countless discussions about ghost stories: Why were they so effective? What was it that made the successful examples work? Which were our favourites? Which frightened us the most?
Collected here are some of the most haunting ghost stories to ensure that, regardless of how garishly lit your Christmas, a troubling shadow will linger somewhere on its periphery.
This was the first known ghost story M.R. James wrote for his Christmas Eve gatherings and, for me, it remains the most affecting. Here we find Dennistoun, an English antiquarian on holiday with friends in southern France who, during a solo day trip to an obscure and decaying cathedral city falls in with some mysterious locals. Via them, Dennistoun encounters an obscure manuscript he discovers is in fact a collection of pages cut from illuminated medieval manuscripts.
All the James elements are there: the stately, slightly fussy erudition, the rare but cursed medieval artefact, the tourist whose curiosity gets the better of him, the shadowy ambivalence about the nature of the ‘ghost’, the “slight haze of distance” (the story is presented as a tale heard second- or perhaps third-hand).
First published in the National Review, 1895; collected in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, Edward Arnold, 1904 and subsequently in Collected Ghost Stories, Edward Arnold, 1931. Read it online at Project Gutenberg here
While celebrated during his lifetime, de la Mare isn’t widely read today, perhaps because his proclivity for rather heightened, maximal prose which often felt even old-fashioned even at the time of he was working. De la Mare’s most popular work remains a poem, ‘The Listeners’, which takes a gentle, wistful view of the supernatural.
However, his fiction, at its strongest, casts a stranger, icier eye on the terrain, informed by an interest in the aberrant and inexplicable and, for me, ‘Seaton’s Aunt’ skirts close to perfection.
As with the best ghost stories, the plot itself is deeply uneventful. A man called Withers recounts a series of encounters with Seaton, an unpopular schoolmate, and his overbearing aunt. Seaton tells him his aunt has the power to commune with the dead, something Withers initially greets with scepticism, writing the two of them off as a family of oddballs, only to reconsider following an odd but materially uneventful encounter with them in adulthood.
The story’s potency lies in its casual presentation of the ghostly and the psychological as profoundly connected, with the murky, malignant atmosphere of Seaton’s home appearing to be a by-product of a reciprocal relationship between cruelty, madness, and an infernal force.
First published in The Riddle and Other Stories, 1923 – read it online here
Shirley Jackson pulls the reader into her suburban worlds where everything is almost normal, but just a touch off kilter. I found it is this subtlety is so unsettling and she is a master of creating dark stories with a lingering unease. I first read her classic We Have Always Lived in the Castle and felt how setting her stories in the recent past, somewhere vaguely familiar but just out of reach, works so well in disarming the reader. In ‘The Tooth’ we meet Clara Spencer as she is in the haze of a bad toothache, travelling in the dead of night to New York to visit the dentist. She is joined part way through the journey by a mysterious stranger (a phantom figure that seems to me to float in from Jackson’s other story ‘The Daemon Lover’). Clara’s confusion increases as the pain, codeine and whisky numbs her reality. She slips in and out of sleep and the story itself gets increasingly disorientating. We follow Clara as she is hauled back and forth from the bus to diners to the back of taxis and waiting rooms, an endless cycle of temporary spaces where she is not allowed to rest. I felt my frustration building as Clara seems isolated in her journey, the mundane routines of the world continuing maddeningly oblivious to her plight.
First published in the Hudson Review, 1949, collected in The Lottery and Other Stories, Farrar, Straus, 1949
A couple honeymooning in a remote East Anglian town at Halloween are drawn into a macabre ritual.
This story stands out for its atmosphere of pure menace which builds incrementally to a frenzied climax. Nobody told Aickman to get the inciting incident in early. He makes you wait while Gerald mansplains railway construction to his much younger wife, Phrynne. And it works. Gerald’s properness is the perfect foil for the unsavoury behaviour of Holihaven’s denizens. His paternalistic concern for the tiny, beautiful Phyrnne leads him to accept the infernal tolling of the town’s church bells; the true inciting incident of the story. When he learns they are ringing to wake the dead, his need to keep up appearances leaves him incapable of evasive action.
And what of Phrynne? I had to look up that name because why not Janet or Barbara? Phyrnne was a courtesan in Ancient Greece, a historical figure, who was tried for indecency and, legend has it, acquitted upon revealing her breasts to the jury. This can’t be an accident. The sex in this story is alluded to in the most oblique way. Nevertheless, Phrynne ends up in a torn nightdress, revealing her lovely body. In the final scene, whilst Gerald is horrified, there is an undercurrent of sexual depravity to Phrynne’s reaction, “her cheeks reddened and her soft mouth became more voluptuous still.”
CW: Gratuitous use of the N word in a simile.
First published in 1955 in The Third Ghost Book, Pan and republished multiple times, including in Aickman’s 1964 collection Dark Entries, Collins and The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Ghost Stories, 1996, OUP
“‘If we succeed, you see what it will mean?’ he said. ‘We shall have an answer at last to the intolerable futility of death.’”
‘The Breakthrough’ opens with electrical engineer Stephen Saunders being transferred to Saxmere, a research facility in the East Anglian marshes run by a disgraced government scientist. The landscape, like the narrative itself, is bleakly drawn; moments of warmth or comfort are transient, and not to be trusted. Saunders himself is acerbic and mean-spirited, his snide observations leaving little room for sentimentality.
First written in 1964 for a Kinglsey Amis-edited sci-fi anthology that never came to fruition, ‘The Breakthrough’ turns a scientific eye upon the paranormal. It touches on hypnotism, early computing, poltergeists, telepathy, military weapons development and synthesised voices, but ultimately culminates in one hubristic experiment—an attempt to capture a person’s life-force at the moment of their death.
The intersection of technology and the supernatural has been explored by many writers—Nigel Kneale’s teleplay The Stone Tape (1972) springs to mind—but it’s the growing sense of menace, more than the subject matter, that makes du Maurier’s story really stick in your teeth. The atmosphere at Saxmere is claustrophobic, ascetic and isolated. The threat of being shut down by ‘The Ministry’ hangs over the facility; there is a desperation to the work. The relationships between the characters are casual and friendly despite this, but the conviviality is sinister given the exploitation taking place—the human test subjects are a young man dying of leukaemia and a child with learning disabilities, both regularly placed under hypnosis by the ominously-named ‘Charon’ machine. Ultimately, this ruthless use of the vulnerable becomes the core of the story’s true horror.
First published in Not After Midnight: Five Long Stories, Gollancz, 1971. Reprinted in Don’t Look Now and Other Stories, Penguin, 1973 and standalone as The Breakthrough, Penguin Modern, 2018
John Burke edited three excellent volumes of Tales of Unease and finally had a collection of his own stories published in 2000. ‘Lucille Would Have Known’ was one of the strongest stories in that collection and one of the highlights of the anthology in which it first appeared. Lucille organises an annual Getaway Weekend Study Tour for a group of couples of a certain age. This year’s tour is of Romantic Castles of the North-East, but the organiser passes away before the date comes around. The tour goes ahead nevertheless. “Lucille would have wanted us to make the trip,” says Madge, Lucille’s “natural successor”. Be careful what you wish for, Madge. Second-hand copies of the New Terrors volumes are worth tracking down for Campbell’s story introductions alone. Of ‘Lucille Would Have Known’ he writes, “In the context of this book his tale may seem a reassuringly traditional ghost story – but there is one detail which may look reassuring but which, in retrospect, grows worse and worse.”
First published in New Terrors 2, edited by Ramsey Campbell, Pan, 1980, reprinted in New Terrors Omnibus edited by Ramsey Campbell, Pan, 1985. Collected in We’ve Been Waiting For You, Ash-Tree Press, 2000
You can read Nicholas Royle’s own personal anthology and other contributions here
A Personal Anthology 