My Top 25 horror short stories October 2025

My Top 25 Horror Short Stories
October 2025

 

I've been reading horror stories since 1970, when I was 9 years old and I saw a copy of Alfred Hitchcock's Monster Museum (Random House, 1965) on the shelf of my grammar school library. 

While most of the stories in the book were rather tame - it was aimed at an audience of juvenile Baby Boomers, after all - Joseph Payne Brennan's story 'Slime' immediately gripped my attention, and from then on, my interest in the genre began, and has lasted since.

Every year now, for October and 'Spooky Stories Month,' I provide a list of my 'Top 2x' horror short stories. The list grows with each passing year, and now stands at 25, which seems condign for the year 2025. These are stories that (in my humble opinion) are the better ones I've encountered in 55 years of reading all manner of horror fiction. Since it's the interval covered by this blog, I've concentrated on stories that first saw print from the early 1960s into the mid-1990s. 

I've posted a brief synopses for each story, to jog memories and to give the reader a sense of what to expect.

One problem with focusing on such stories is that in many instances the books where they first appeared long are out of print, and copies in good condition have steep asking prices. Accordingly, where available, I've tried to provide alternate sources for obtaining these stories.

My Top 25, in chronological order:

The First Days of May, by Claude Veillot, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 1961; Tales of Terror from Outer Space, 1975

‘Alien invasion’ theme, with some convincing bug-eyed monsters. A pdf copy is available here.

***

One of the Dead, by William Wood, The Saturday Evening Post, October 31, 1964; Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Scream Along with Me; A Walk with the Beast, 1969; Great American Ghost Stories, 1991

Although a bit overwritten, this is a well-crafted melding of the haunted house theme with the anomie of mid-1960s life in suburban Los Angeles.  

***

The Road to Mictlantecutli, by Adobe James, Adam Bedside Reader, 1965; The Sixth Pan Book of Horror Stories,1965; The Arbor House Treasury of Horror and the Supernatural, 1981

Morgan, a ruthless criminal, is travelling on a mysterious road in Mexico. The strange sights and passions he encounters will lead him to change his life........for good, or for ill.

'Adobe James' was the pseudonym of American writer James Moss Cardwell (1926 – 1990), who had his short stories published in a variety of magazines and anthologies during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. 

***

Longtooth, by Edgar Pangborn, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, January 1970; The Best of Modern Horror, 1989

A resident of rural Maine discovers something disturbing in the deep, dark woods. A pdf copy is available here.

***

Goat, by David Campton, New Writings in Horror and the Supernatural #1, 1971; Whispers: An Anthology of Fantasy and Horror, 1977

Creepy goings-on in an English village. A fine early example of what now is classified as 'folk horror.'

 

***

The Human Side of the Village Monster, by Edward Bryant, Universe 1, 1970; Among the Dead and Other Events Leading Up to the Apocalypse, 1973

 

Despite its cumbersome title, this is a well-composed tale about a near-future New York City ruined by overpopulation and Eco-Catastrophe. It seems to have a predictable denouement, but veers off into an unexpected, but unpleasant, direction.

***

Satanesque, by Alan Weiss, The Literary Magazine of Fantasy and Terror, #6, 1974; The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series III, 1975

Starts off on a thoroughly conventional note, then unexpectedly transitions into something entirely imaginative and offbeat.

 

***

The Shortest Way, by David Drake, Whispers #3, March 1974; From the Heart of Darkness, 1983; Vettius and His Friends, 1989;  Night & Demons, 2012

A 'Vettius' story set in the days of the Roman empire. Our hero elects to travel on a road that the locals take care to avoid. An atmospheric, memorable tale.

***

The Taste of Your Love, by Eddy C. Bertin, The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series III, 1975; The Whispering Horror, 2013

One of the better Serial Killer tales I’ve read.

***

The Changer of Names, by Ramsey Campbell, Swords Against Darkness II, 1977; The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories: 4, 1978; Far Away and Never, 2021

I've never been a fan of Campbell’s horror stories and novels, but his sword-and-sorcery stories featuring the ‘Ryre’ character are entertaining exercises in creepiness. There are metaphors and similes abounding in the Ryre tales, to be sure, but as compared to Campbell's horror stories the purple prose is reduced in scope, and plotting receives due consideration. 

While the Swords Against Darkness paperbacks have exorbitant asking prices, a new (October 2021) reprint of Far Away and Never from DMR Press collects all four of the Ryre stories, along with other fantasy tales from Campbell's early career.  

***

Long Hollow Swamp, by Joseph Payne Brennan, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, January 1976; The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series V, 1977

A great 'monsters-on-the-loose' tale from Brennan.

***

Sing A last Song of Valdese, by Karl Edward Wagner, Chacal #1, Winter 1976; The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series V, 1977; Night Winds, 1978, 1983

One of two entries by Wagner, who wrote his share of duds, but when he was On, he was On. In a remote forest, a lone traveler comes upon an inn filled with sinister characters. A pdf copy is available here.

***

Window, by Bob Leman, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May 1980; The 1981 Annual World’s Best SF, 1981; The Best of Modern Horror, 1989

A neat mix of sci-fi and horror, revolving around a portal to another dimension. A pdf copy is available here.

***

Where the Summer Ends, by Karl Edward Wagner, Dark Forces, August 1980; In A Lonely Place, 1983; The American Fantasy Tradition, 2002

 

A second entry from Wagner. It’s hot, humid, and dangerous in 1970s Knoxville. Stay away from the kudzu !

***

The New Rays, by M. John Harrison, Interzone #1, Spring 1982, The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XI, 1983; The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, 2012

A disturbing tale about disease and the desperate search for a cure, with proto-steampunk leanings. 

***

After-Images, by Malcolm John Edwards, Interzone #4, Spring 1983, The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XII, 1984; Interzone: The First Anthology, 1986

Another fine melding of sci-fi and horror, this time set in an English suburb. It’s too bad that Edwards, a playwright and editor, didn’t write more short stories. A pdf copy is available here.

***

The Man with Legs, by Al Sarrantonio, Shadows No. 6, October 1983, The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XII, 1984

Two kids learn some disturbing secrets about their family history.

***

High Tide, by Leanne Frahm, Fears, 1983

Frahm, an Australian writer, sets this novelette in the vicinity of the Newry Islands in coastal Queensland. A family camping trip to Mud Island discovers something strange is going on amidst the mangrove swamps: Eco-horror at its creepiest !

 

                                                                        *** 

Salvage Rites, by Ian Watson, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 1987, The Best of Modern Horror, 1989

 

Tim and Rosy, an English couple of modest means, take a trip to the town dump…….which, they discover, has its problems. 

***

 

Mengele, by Lucius Shepard, Universe 15, 1985, The Jaguar Hunter, 1988

Troubling things are going on at an estate located in a remote region of Paraguay.

***

Red Christmas, by David Garnett, The Year's Best Horror Stories: Series XIV, 1986

What seems like a conventional Mad Slasher story has a neat little twist at the end.

***

The Picknickers, by Brian Lumley, Final Shadows, 1991, The Year's Best Horror Stories: XX, 1992

Unsettling events are happening in the graveyard of a Welsh coal-mining village.

***

Under the Crust, by Terry Lamsley (1993); The Mammoth Book of New Terror, 2004

 

Like Ian Watson's 'Salvage Rites,' above, this is another tale set in the confines of a UK rubbish dump ('tip'), this one, Dove Holes near Buxton (Brits seem to have a real talent for mingling  landfills with horror themes). In 'Crust,' Maurice's encounter with some creepy habitues of Dove Holes eventually leads him into Lovecraftian territory. Atmospheric and imaginative.

 

Aftertaste, by John Shirley, Bones of the Children, 1996, Black Butterflies, 2001

 

The Zombie Apocalypse comes to the ghetto. A great tale from Shirley, mixing splatterpunk with irreverent humor.

***

Shining On, by Billie Sue Mosiman, Future Net, 1996

A mutant suffering from severe handicaps finds a friend online. But you know what they say about online friends: just who are they in person ?

Book Review: The Mind Behind the Eye

Book Review: 'The Mind Behind the Eye' by Joseph Green

4 / 5 Stars

 

'The Mind Behind the Eye' first saw print in the UK in 1971 as 'Gold the Man.' This paperback edition (190 pp.) was the second DAW Book ever published, in April, 1971, and features cover art by Josh Kirby.

Author Green, born in 1931, has had considerable longevity as a writer, publishing novels and short stories up until 2020.

 

'Mind' is a strange little book...........

 

The premise certainly is offbeat: in 1981, Earth comes under attack from a race of aliens known only as the Exterminators. The attack involves dispersal of a biological agent into the atmosphere, and is unsuccessful. Earth wins a minor victory and expels the aliens from their forward landing base on Mars, but over the next 28 years there are successive attacks, each with a new biological agent. It is clear that the Exterminators intend to keep attacking until they find an agent capable of eliminating Homo sapiens from the planet, after which, presumably, they will colonize Earth.

 

Albert Aaron Golderson, aka 'Gold,' stands 6 feet 7 inches tall, weighs 240 lbs, is twenty-eight, a misanthrope, and one of only two super-geniuses on Earth, each genetically engineered to represent a new type of human being: Homo superior. 

 

Gold's Eastern Bloc counterpart is a man named Petrovna. As 'Mind' opens Gold learns that an Exterminator ship has crash-landed on the moon, and its solitary pilot, who has suffered brain damage, recovered from the craft. This pilot (we later learn his name is Soam-A-Tane) is a humanoid being 300 feet tall - ! The Coordinator of Defense, and Petrovna, have a daring plan that represents Earth's best hope for survival: the damaged half of Soam-A-Tane's brain is to be removed and replaced by a computerized 'command and control center,' nestled in the alien's skull and manned by Gold and a dour Slavic woman named Marina. 

 

In a sort of variation of the kaiju theme in Japanese sci-fi, and the 2013 movie Pacific Rim, Gold and Marina will, from their center behind the right eye of the witless Soam-A-Tane, manipulate the autonomic nervous system of the colossal body.

 

The giant is returned to his repaired ship and the ship flown to Mars, where it is emplaced in the landing complex abandoned by the Exterminators. A distress signal is triggered and in due course, the Exterminators travel across interstellar space to retrieve their stricken pilot. Once the pilot arrives on the Exterminator home world, the planet Bragair, Gold and Marine are tasked with spying on their adversaries and, if possible, relaying information to Earth that will aid defense forces in countering Exterminator attacks. 

I won't disclose any spoilers, save to say that as events unfold Gold will learn why the Exterminators are intent on colonizing Earth. If Gold is to save mankind from extinction, he will have to find a way to exploit this information and end the interspecies conflict.

 

"Mind' is arguably a sex novel (!) masquerading as science fiction. Author Green regularly intersperses sexual episodes (or, as he disingenuously labels them, "...the great human joy of sharing") indulged in by Gold in times past and present, into the narrative. Some of these sexcapades, such as one involving a black, teenage prostitute, or one involving the rape of a team member, may have been mildly provocative by the standards of fiction of the early 1970s, but modern-day readers likely will find them transgressive and most Un-Woke. 

 

While inserting sex into narratives was deemed a hip and trendy action in the days of the New Wave movement, what Green provides seems excessive, shading as it does into softcore porn. While such content may have been an effort on Green's part to humanize Gold, I suspect that in truth, the author figured some carnality would be irresistable to an audience of frustrated sci-fi nerds and geeks (let's face it, a commercial strategy that worked very, very well for authors like John Norman.......).

 

In the latter chapters of the novel author Green transitions into hard sci-fi, featuring quasi-pedantic discourses on stellar physics and chemistry. 

 

I finished 'Mind' debating over whether to give it a Three Star or a Four Star Rating, and settled for a Four Star. While the novel can drag at times and the 'erotic' passages came across as more than a little creepy, overall, the book has an imaginative sensibility that leverages the ethos of the New Wave movement, and for this, 'Mind' deserves credit. Readers looking for an eccentric, unconventional science fiction adventure will want to sit down with 'The Mind Behind the Eye.'

Heavy Metal June 1979

Heavy Metal

June 1979

 

June, 1979, and in rotation on my local album-oriented rock (AOR) station WAAL, 'Dance Away,' from Roxy Music, is in rotation. It's a track from their 1979 LP Manifesto. In a year in which New Wave was dominating the early play lists, the Roxies, with their polish and romanticism, were something of an enigma, but they made really good music.

 

The June, 1979 issue of Heavy Metal magazine is on the newsstand. Angus McKie provides the front cover illustration: 'The Performer,' while for the back cover, we get a Betty Page tribute from Marcus Boas, titled 'What Happened to Betty.'

 

For the masthead, editors Sean Kelly and Valerie Marchant let us know, in their inevitably deadpan, too-hip-too-care way, what is going on in this latest issue.

 

Looking through this issue from perspective of 46 (!) years, I'm struck by how impactful it was to see comic art rendered in process color. Although Heavy Metal had been on the stands for over two years now, it was striking to see the color schemes displayed on the pages of a 'slick' magazine devoted to sci-fi and fantasy comics and graphics.

 

Look at the colors for the second installment of 'Alien: The Illustrated Story,' and the penultimate episode of Corben's 'New Tales of the Arabian Nights':

 

In 1979, this kind of reproduction was commonplace in the albums sold in Western Europe, but novel and exciting for comics published in the USA.

 

For an excerpt for the novel 'East Wind Coming,' by Arthur Byron Cover, the HM editors feature a full-page illustration by Bernie Wrightson. Had it been done in the CMYK 'spot color' print scheme then still in widespread use in comics, it would not have had the visual impact that it does when rendered in process color.

 

The major piece in the June issue is the complete saga of 'Captain Future,' by Serge Clerc, which first appeared in Metal Hurlant in 1978. Its deep blacks and finer lines are admirably displayed in the pages of HM, showing that it wasn't just color artwork that benefited from the 'slick' magazine printing process.

 

Captain Future is filled with little allusions to pop culture; one character, 'Stiv Budder,' the captain of a fleet of space pirates, is modeled on Steven John Bator, aka 'Stiv Bator,' lead singer for the Cleveland punk band the Dead Boys. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rolling Stone, May 4, 1978

 

 

Then we have two quintessential 'stoner' comics, from those early days of HM. 

 

First, there's ............'Pyloon,' by Ray Rue  and Leo Giroux, Jr. Several episodes appeared in the late seventies, all featuring cribbed artwork, brilliant colors, and deranged narratives. Deranged, that is, if you weren't stoned. If you were stoned, then it all made perfect sense.

 

And of course, we must have a look at the latest installment of McKie's 'So Beautiful and So Dangerous,' another comic that mandated process color reproduction, and the assistance of Cannabis sativa, to understand.

 

The June, 1979 issue of Heavy Metal is another of the better ones. Worth picking up if you can find it for $10 or less on the shelves of a used bookstore or antiques mall.

Heavy Metal May 1979

Heavy Metal

May, 1979

 

May, 1979, and atop the Billboard Hot 200 chart for albums sits the Doobie Brothers with Minute by Minute. Fast rising, and soon to take over the top slot, is Supertramp's Breakfast in America. Also in the top five is Spirits Having Flown by the Bee Gees; little did anyone know that it would be the last time a Bee Gees LP ever would top the charts.........

I have gone to Gordon's Cigar Store with my hard-earned cash and picked up the May issue of Heavy Metal magazine. This is a good issue. The front cover, 'The Wizard of Anharitte,' is by UK artist Peter Jones, and the back cover, a glowing fantasy by Clyde Caldwell, titled 'Centaur's Idol.'

 

Lots of quirky material inside, material best taken in with the accompaniment of herbal substances.

While Moebius continues to contribute 'Airtight Garage,' frustratingly, Sean Kelly and Julie Simmons insist on parceling it out in very brief (i.e., two- and three-page) installments. 

Also presented in an installment is part 4 of the novel 'Starcrown,' by John Pocsik. While it got a nice treatment from artists like Gil Kane, 'Starcrown' never advanced beyond a limited serialization in Heavy Metal.

 

Perhaps the major feature in this May issue is the first installment of a serialization of the opening chapter (i.e., 16 pages) of the graphic novel accompanying the upcoming film Alien. The graphic novel, by Walt Simonson, was the first such publication ever to appear on the New York Times bestseller list for paperbacks.

Also noteworthy were some original pieces, such as 'Night Angel,' by Paul Abrams, the continuation of the 'New Tales of the Arabian Nights,' by Richard Corben, and a retro-style adventure, starring a comely female: '8 Bells; Amora,' by Grey Morrow. All good stuff !

 

 

 

The late Al Sarrantonio contributes 'Roger in the Womb,' a three-page story about a most unusual fetus. It's humorous, but also with a rather offbeat, disconcerting note at the ending. 

One of the more interesting pieces in this May issue is a black-and-white comic by Ben Katchor, titled 'A Proposed Architect.' Katchor, who would go on to produce comics and graphic novels featuring a Jewish urbanite named Julius Knipl, focuses on cityscapes and their buildings. In 'Architect,' there are no tits and no ass (rather unusual for Heavy Metal). Still, it succeeds as a memorable excursion into the surreal.