10 (edited by Ellen Datlow), The Best of the Best Horror of the Year (edited by Ellen Datlow) Where to find it: North American Lake Monsters (re-released as Monsterland) by Nathan Ballingrud The Best Horror of the Year Vol. He knows how to finesse an idea like no other, and while he might be best known for “The Visible Filth” (the story that inspired Wounds), you also can’t go wrong with this tale of two families devastated by a werewolf attack and its startling aftereffects. “Wild Acre” by Nathan Ballingrud Perhaps best known as the author behind Hulu releases like Monsterland and Wounds, Nathan Ballingrud is one of the most gifted short fiction artists working in horror right now on both a conceptual scale and the sentence-by-sentence prose level and on. Consider it a pre-programmed reading list, or simply a gateway to many more terrors beyond.

Here are 15 of the best pieces of horror short fiction by contemporary authors working in the genre right now, along with where you can find them. You can finish quite a few of them in the half-hour or so before you fall asleep (if you fall sleep, that is), and if you don’t have time to burn through a couple dozen novels in a month, you can dedicate the entire spooky season to nibbling on creepy short after creepy sort.īut which stories should you read, and where can you find them? We’ve got some ideas. Horror short stories are a wonderfully effective incubator for ideas that might not work on a novel-length level, and they’re also perfectly suited to October nights spent reading in bed.

Yes, horror novels can be vast, 100,000-word explorations of character and pain and worldbuilding, but the right storyteller can sharpen a piece of short fiction down until it’s a tiny, deadly point, then slip it right between your ribs.

The delicate art of the short story is practiced in every literary genre, but it’s perhaps never more effective than when it’s deployed for horror.

The Ghost Sequences by A.C. Wise