The Sea Raiders, H. G. Wells
This adventure short story takes us to Devon in England. A retired man takes an afternoon walk along the English coast. He notices a pinkish form far below surrounded by some kind of sea animal.…
Brown Wolf, Jack London
Leiningen Versus the Ants, Carl Stephenson
The Most Dangerous Game, Richard Connell
The Seed from the Sepulchre, Clark Ashton Smith
The Murders In The Rue Morgue, E. A. Poe
This detective short story from E. A. Poe has been recognized as the first modern detective story. Poe referred to it as one of his “tales of ratiocination”. Two murders happened that time in Paris and…
My Hobby, Tom Fabian
The Crooked Man, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
A Jury of Her Peers, Susan Glaspell
The Purloined Letter, Edgar Allan Poe
The Willows, Algernon Blackwood
This fantasy short story is about two friends who go to the canoe trip together and decide to spend the night on a small island. Soon they start to realise that there are supernatural forces hidden in…
The Mummy’s Foot, Theophile Gautier
Tobermory, Saki (H. H. Munro)
A Lovely and Terrible Thing, Chris Womersley
The fun they had, Isaac Asimov
The Kugelmass episode, Woody Allen
The Night The Ghost Got In, James Thurber
Amazingly funny short story The Night The Ghost Got In is a fictionalized account of life in the Thurber household while its author was growing up. A man hears footsteps downstairs. The family is thrown into confusion…
There Was Once, Margaret Atwood
Action will be taken, Heinrich Boll
The Gift of the Magi, O. Henry
Tea, Saki (H. H. Munro)
The Disappearance Of Crispina Umberleigh, Saki
The End Of The Party, Graham Greene
A classic horror short story about fear of the dark. What is the most masterful is the way Greene develops a subtle but emphatic language of light to illuminate the enveloping and ineffable terror of his story’s…
The Rats In The Walls, H. P. Lovecraft
John Bartine’s Watch, Ambrose Bierce
The Monkey’s Paw, W. W. Jacobs
The petting zoo, Peter de Niverville
A Diagnosis of death, Ambrose Bierce
A Rose For Emily, William Faulkner
The most famous and as well most anthologized William Faulkner’s psychological short story A Rose For Emily evokes the terms Southern gothic and grotesque. It is full of dark images – a decaying mansion, a…
The Mark On The Wall, Virginia Woolf
The Chicken Who Wouldn’t Eat Gravel, Clara Dillingham Pierson
A Dark Brown Dog, Stephen Crane
The Lady, or the Tiger? Frank Stockton
The Mortal Immortal, Mary W. Shelley
This sci-fi short story is about a man named Winzy, who is given the gift of immortality by an alchemist. At first, immortality appears to promise him eternal tranquility. However, it soon becomes apparent that…
William and Mary, Roald Dahl
Barney, Will Stanton
Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment, Nathaniel Hawthorne
A Sound of Thunder, Ray Bradbury
The Veldt, Ray Bradbury
Return To Paradise, Eliza Riley
A very short romantic short story Return to Paradise from Eliza Riley takes us to the island of the main protagonist Lisa had her honeymoon. Here she thinks about her marriage… Lisa gazed out over…