The Season of Short Stories: Six Tales to Read Before Halloween

Halloween is the season of the short story. I've mentioned in previous blog posts that perhaps, more than any genre, horror is made for the short story medium. After all: who didn't sit up at night during a sleepover telling scary stories as a child, whispering into flashlights after a secret game of "light as a feather, stiff as a board" and before someone pulls out the Ouiji board?

And since Halloween means horror, the fantastical, and stories you can tell to scare your friends, I decided to compile a list of six stories to read for Halloween: but these stories aren't your typical ghost stories. Instead, these are tales that will leave you feeling haunted.

1. "Stone Animals" by Kelly Link

I read this story curled up in a library chair, sick and tired. It's not traditional horror, but it certainly leaves the reader feeling haunted, much like the things in the story. In Stone Animals, a family moves into a house: but it's not the house that's haunted, nor is it their things that are haunted, at least to start. If anything, when coming to the house, it's the people themselves that become haunted (although they certainly don't think that). Stone Animals is one of the few stories I've read where I had no inkling of where it was going and when it would get there. I knew there were rabbits, objects that were wrong, and a family was strained by their past, but how it would all come together was another thing entirely. Even more than that, it was a story that left me feeling haunted after I read it. I spent the rest of my time in the library that day feeling uneasy and strange, and unwilling to read another story because it just seemed wrong to do anything but think of that one.

Stone Animals is available for free at Small Beer Press as part of Kelly Link's "Magic for Beginners" collection. You can also get it (and five to twelve other books) as part of the Humble Bundle ebook bundle for charity (only until October 23). I'm an avid supporter of the Humble Bundle, and I encourage you all to take that route if you can.

"We are all books of blood..."

Every day is Halloween for me.

I don't mean that in a '90s Goth, pale makeup and platform boots way (although back in 2005 I did). I also don't mean it in a human bones in my apartment way (because all my apartment really says is "my boyfriend likes sports" and "I have a cat"). Mostly I mean it in a reading horror stories and watching horror movies to fall asleep every day and night way.

And, really, I read a lot of horror. I watch a lot of horror. I read and watch a lot of things that wouldn't normally be considered horror but are so bad-- well, that's another story.

And lately I've been reading Clive Barker's "Books of Blood", a terrifying tryst of short stories and one amazing introduction in the full collection that really makes you think about how the publishing industry has changed.

In 1984 the first collection of "Books of Blood" was published. At the time, Barker was a relative unknown -- a sometimes-movie-guy who wrote fun, gory, and occasionally brilliant short stories that were there to scare you. It's something that you never see now. Not because of the lack of horror writers, or lack of short stories, or lack of new authors, but because of a lack of willingness for a publisher to release an entire collection of one new author, however great he or she is.

It's something that makes me incredibly sad, because short stories are such a cornerstone of horror. They're something almost everyone has grown up with, even if not in written form. Horror stories are the campfire, late-night-sleepover tales. They're the things you dare each other to do in after-school programs and school yards. "My friend went to the mirror and said 'Candyman' three times and woke up covered in bruises and had candy in her bed." Bloody Mary and monsters in the closet. Maybe they weren't the world's most brilliant stories, but they were there.

Now they seem impossibly hard to track down. Yes, there are the occasional anthologies stuffed in bookshelves, the new collections by Stephen King or a couple other authors everyone has already heard of, but to find a good tale to terrify, told in a new voice (that doesn't involve vampire romance in the YA section), it's all but impossible to find, because there is an unwillingness to take risks, to release good, scary fiction by someone who no one knows.

I suppose in some ways this is where self-publishing comes in, but that's not a track I am familiar in.

Mostly, I just think: It's the season for horror, but after I put down my Clive Barker books, my Lovecrafts and Kings, what am I left with? And why, when there are so many aspiring horror writers, I can never seem to find any in print?

These are things I want to know.