So much horror is caused by people absolutely having to know. H.P. Lovecraft and his circle realized this, and no one better than Clark Ashton Smith. The third-to-last paragraph of this nasty little fucker has one of the best "entrances" ever...
Arthur Machen is an acquired taste, and I'm still in the process of acquiring it. But I can tell it'll be worth it. Anyone who's read SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE by H.P. Lovecraft knows that the mere descriptions of Machen's stories...
We're in the final stretch here, so I'm going to try to pick the heavy-hitters. This one, by Algernon Blackwood (I was so close to choosing "The Wendigo"!) kicks off our run up to Halloween. H.P. Lovecraft thought this was the...
F. Marion Crawford wrote this -- the bloated, bloviating cousin to Ambrose Bierce's super-short "The Boarded Window". While Bierce's tale genially strolls up to a sucker-punch ending, Crawford's little number is packed through with creepiness, horror, and fright. And then...
Ambrose Bierce. His "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" got H.P. Lovecraft's blood a-boiling. Being the Ramones to the whole Cthulhu Mythos alone gets him on this list. But, again, he's got so many to choose from. Fuck it, I'm choosing this. And...
Michael Reaves has a weird resume. He wrote on cartoons like THE REAL GHOSTBUSTERS, and he also penned this mutant hybrid love-and-horror story. It's about a changeling. You know, like when a human baby gets switched with a...
Arthur Conan Doyle writing a horror story?! And what's more, it's a big, honking, flying MONSTER story? Well, yeah. And it works. The creator of Sherlock Holmes is channeling Lovecraft here. But where Lovecraft suggests, Doyle likes to be plausible...
Everyone knows a Pear-Shaped Man. I read George R.R. Martin's story in OMNI, during my senior year in high school. A friend's parents were going through a nasty divorce, and the mom had moved to a new apartment building nearby....
John Collier -- which one do I pick? The super-short "The Chaser" (shorter than "The Clock"!), which is a disturbing story about why love potions only cost a dollar? "Evening Primrose" has been so over-adapted, -anthologized, and -remembered it was...
H.F. Arnold was 24 years old when he published this story in WEIRD TALES magazine. Thankfully, the magazine's publisher didn't see the worth of the story, and so didn't make it a cover story and didn't assign an illustrator to...
