My Favorite Horror Story

It's probably too soon for me as I haven't read much (roughly 25 books of fiction, sadly)... but so far...

William Hope Hodgson - House On The Borderland
William Hope Hodgson - The Night Land
Edgar Allan Poe - The Black Cat
HP Lovecraft - Rats In The Walls
HP Lovecraft - Dreams In The Witch House
Ralph Adams Cram - The Dead Valley
MR James - Oh Whistle And I'll Come To You My Lad
MR James - Count Magnus
Arthur Machen - The White People
Arthur Machen - Great God Pan
Robert W Chambers - The Yellow Sign
Nathaniel Hawthorne - Rappaccini's Daughter
Algernon Blackwood - The Willows
Clive Barker - In The Hills, The Cities
Hugh B Cave - Murgunstrumm
Hugh B Cave - Stragella
R Chetwynd-Hayes - The Jumpity Jim
Ramsey Campbell - The Brood
J Sheridan Le Fanu - Schalken The Painter
Lucy Clifford - The New Mother
 
Since James went all idiosyncratic on us, I have no qualms about doing this:

1. Homer, Odyssey, Rhapsody 11/Nekyia
2. Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
3. Moses/Anonymous, The Book of Job
4. John the Evangelist, Book of Revelation
5. Dante, The Inferno
6. Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
7. Lovecraft, The Dreams in the Witch House*
8. Bowles, The Sheltering Sky
9. Bizot, The Gate
10. Beevor, Stalingrad
11. Krasnahorkai, Satantango, V Unraveling
12. Chessex, The Vampire of Ropraz
13. Ligotti, Severini**

Every single one of these choices horrified me at the time of first reading.

* I suffer from frequent episodes of sleep paralysis. This condition makes HPL's story cut deep.

** If you live on the Equator it truly resonates.
 
There are many to enumerate, so I selected the ones that struck me as a young reader (9-10 years old), back when I started reading horror stories:

1. Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher
2. H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness
3. Bram Stoker, Dracula
4. Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Dorian Gray
5. Horacio Quiroga, The Feather Pillow
 
Hell-Ghost said:
Robert H. Barlow's The Night Ocean
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I think I had avoided reading this due to the concept of 'collaborations' always bothering the part of my brain that needs to distinguish a single, clear authorial voice, but I checked this story out on Hell-Ghost's recommendation and was astonished at just how effective it was.

It took the themes of Dagon, The Call of Cthulhu and The Shadow Over Innsmouth, but handled them with remarkable restraint. No monsters. Just an eerie disquiet and stillness, giving way to haunting melancholy.

Adored it.
 
I agree with James. If read carefully, one sees "The Night Ocean" was the only possible sequel to "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" worth writing. The style, oddly enough, reminds me of "The Dark Chamber". Judging from the previous Barlow revision--the manuscript exists--Lovecraft probably rewrote phrases and even sentences. I'd guess it's about twenty percent Lovecraft, maybe a little more. Of course, they could have discussed Barlow's ideas for the story during Lovecraft's last visit but there's no evidence of that I'm aware of...
 
miguel1984 said:
5. Horacio Quiroga, The Feather Pillow
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Good shout! I read this on Gutenberg just now whilst in bed. Scariest use of a pillow I have read since MR James' Casting the Runes. This fear should be tapped in to more often.
 
Personally I don't see the sexual element in "Whistle". I think his fear of touching it is similar to the way we don't fear the average spider actually hurting us but merely touching it at all. Except he does fear the thing will hurt him.
 
"How Love Came to Professor Guildea" by Robert Hichens springs to mind about the intimacy. Seems more like a portrayal of a character than Hichens having such hangups though.

It seems to me that Machen shows a real disgust at sex (which isn't necessarily repression). I've said it elsewhere but the more I think about sex being the central horror of "Great God Pan" and "The White People" the more it impoverishes them for me. I like to think it was something more bizarre than that.
 
Ligotti's "Vasterian" was the first horror tale to affect me as deeply as "The Call of Cthulhu".
 
The scariest story I think I have read is Aickman's The Hospice. Hodgson's The Voice of the Night also really creeped me out.

Among novels I would single out Ramsey Campbell's The Grin of the Dark. It's one of the few horror books I haven't been able to finish because I found it too unsettling.
 
well, "favourite,"i can't say. But most horrifying, certainly:

Albert Camus, L'étranger
Roberto Bolaño, 2666
Rupert Thomson, The Insult

Okay, these are novels. Is that cheating?
 
Ramsey Campbell's stories "Napier Court" and "In The Bag" work quite well on me.

And I should give Aickman's "The Inner Room" a well deserved reread.

I also remember being fond of James's "Number 13."

I will only mention "The Prodigy of Dreams" by Thomas Ligotti; otherwise the list would become quite populated pretty fast. "The Bungalow House", "Teatro Grottesco", "Alice's Last Adventure", "Nethescurial", "The Night School", [...]
 
Futilitililility said:
And I should give Aickman's "The Inner Room" a well deserved reread.
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I have read it (or heard it read) around ten to fifteen times. It becomes deeper, darker and more beautiful, profound and unsettling with each read. There is too much to unpack in just one reading, as with most of Aickman's best stories.
 
"The Plot" by Justin Isis, while science fiction and not explicitly containing elements of horror, is horrifying conceptually, and this concept happens to agitate one of my deepest personal fears.
 
I slowly realize what a beehive this question can turn out to be. The longer I think about "favorite" stories, the more come to mind, sometimes with the help of looking at books and their contents. So I'll just mention two more, then silence: "The Blue Star" and "House of Horror" by Eddie M. Angerhuber.
 
The greatest horror story of all time is very brief and anonymously written, so I will just post it in its entirety below:

WARNING: IF YOU HAVE A HEART CONDITION DO NOT READ THIS. YOU WILL DROP THE FLOOR, FLOPPING LIKE A FISH, WHILE CLENCHING YOUR HEART SEEING AS YOU ARE HAVING A HEART ATTACK. ALSO: IF YOU HAVE A SENSITIVE ANUS DO NOT READ THIS; THE BRICK YOU SHAT WILL BE PAINFUL.

A FEW YEARS AGO A MAN WAS WALKING DOWN A ROAD BECAUSE HIS CAR BROKE DOWN AND HE SAW A CAR COMING UP BEHIND HIM SO HE STUCK OUT HIS THUMB TO HITCH HIKE AND THE CAR STOPPED AHEAD OF HIM. HE RAN UP TO THE PASSENGER SIDE AND OPENED THE DOOR. WHEN HE OPENED THE DOOR A SKELETON POPPED OUT
 
A Pallid Devil,Bearing Cypress-Richard Gavin.
The Seer of Trieste-Mark Valentine.
In Arcadia-Reggie Oliver.
 
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