My Favorite Horror Story

[paeng]

I was asked that question when I joined one online group, and I answered "Professor Guildea".

[waffles]

A favorite story that I haven't read in several years is "Sticks". It sticks with you

[max_renn]

I think Hugh Walpole's sinister tale "The Silver Mask" deserves a mention.

[SwansSoilMe/SwansSaveMe]

Stephen King's "The Mist" novella was a favorite way back when. I liked that he left the mystery intact, and the tense/gloomy/adventurous ending. I don't know what my favorite is now, I'm pretty sure something by TL. I did like most of the stories in Robert Aikman's Cold Hand in Mine last year.

[AetherSanctum]

Do you mean short story or novel?

My favorite horror short story would have to be "The Picture In The House" by H.P. Lovecraft

My favorite horror novel is "Blood Meridian" by Cormac McCarthy. (Although it is a western)

[bendk]

I will also add "The Desolate Presence" by Thomas Owen. TL mentioned this author in one of his interviews many years ago. I just unearthed the book while looking through some boxes. I have only read about half a dozen of his stories, and this is the only one I really care for, but it is outstanding. It may be his most well known story because the book is titled The Desolate Presence and Other Uncanny Stories by Thomas Owen. I would highly recommend it to TL fans. It is very Ligottian.

Aethersanctum,
I agree that Blood Meridian is a great "horror" novel. It is one of my favorites too.

[beautifulstars]

I thought it might help me to post this question in a community of knowledgable horror enthusiasts. I am trying to put together a collection of good horror stories for my high school class. I read an anthology years ago -- something picked up while traveling in a hostel, and then left behind -- which contained two excellent, spine-chilling stories. One was, I have recently discovered, AM Burrage's 'The Waxworks.' The other I cannot seem to find.
It was about a young boy hidden away with his reclusive mother in the forest, and found after her death. He wouldn't speak, and as far as I can recall, it was believed that she killed him through abuse. Although, eventually it was discovered that the case was exactly the opposite. Few horror stories have chilled me in this way. Any ideas?

[Icicle Kite]

My memory doesn't usually paint a coherent picture for things I've read in the deep past....

At the moment I'd choose:

"Xelucha" M.P. Sheil
"Phorfor" M.P. Sheil (the entire collection "Shapes in the Fire" is quite remarkable)
"Conflict" Stéphane Mallarmé
"Witch In-Grain" R. Murray Gilchrist
"A Country Dr." Franz Kafka
"the Masque of the Red Death" Poe
"Los of Breath" Poe
"Four Beasts in One; the Homo-Camelopard" Poe
"Lottery in Babble" Jorge Luis Borges
"the Whisperer of the Darkness" H.P. Lovecraft

-If I could Cheat a little, and Consider a couple novels and Poetry, then:

"Maldoror" Comte de Lautreamont
"the Hill of Dreams" Arthur Machen
"Milton" William Blake ( Had some most fantastic dreams after reading this)
"Aha!" Aleister Crowley
"Moon Child" ...Crowley

couple of these are more supernatural then horror...but whatever.

[SOTOS]

O'Brien fans should also check out 'The Spider's Eye'. Uncanny and original.

My favourite horror story is Orson Scott Card's 'Eumenides in the Fourth Floor Lavatory'. The tittle is a bit of a mouthful, I admit, but the story is quite simply a masterpiece.

[gveranon]

Quote Originally Posted by Icicle Kite

At the moment I'd choose: "Xelucha" M.P. Sheil "Phorfor" M.P. Sheil (the entire collection "Shapes in the Fire" is quite remarkable)

I’ve been meaning to read M. P. Shiel ever since running across a description of his work in Brian Aldiss’s Billion Year Spree, back when I was a teenager too many years ago.

In his essay “Thomas Ligotti: The Escape from Life,” S. T. Joshi says of Ligotti’s prose style: “The closest analogy, on purely stylistic grounds, is the eccentric idiom of M. P. Shiel, although he is not a writer whom Ligotti acknowledges as an influence or model....[Ligotti’s work] stylistically echoes Shiel’s tortuous, metaphor-laden prose-poetry, while at the same time seeking to capture that atmosphere of nightmarish or hallucinatory strangeness that typifies Shiel’s best work.”

I’ve glanced briefly at some of Shiel’s writings on the Project Gutenberg site, and here and there I can see a definite resemblance between the two writer’s styles. But -- at least based on the little of Shiel I’ve looked at -- the resemblance seems to be spotty. Some of Shiel’s sentences and paragraphs don’t seem very much like Ligotti’s. Still, Joshi’s observation is an interesting one -- food for thought for whenever I get around to reading Shiel.