Blessed be, b*tches!
To be honest, this list began as a sweet throwback to some of the short fiction from our middle school English textbooks that spooked and delighted our tiny, hormonal brains. But because everything is creepier in quarantine, it became a list of dangerously talented horror writers who tap into our overwhelming, buried fears for our own humanity in the face of society's collapse. Some are short-short stories and some are works of nightmare fiction that you can't stop reading.
Enjoy your time locked in your house with these haunting reads.
This is short and innocently creepy.
"The Landlady" is a simple account of a traveler who finds lodging at a boarding house run by a sweet elderly woman who invites him to tea. What's the worst that could happen?
When Carroll published her collection of five haunting graphic stories,Through the Woods, it was called a masterpiece of the comic art form. All of her stories are creepy twists on familiar narratives. The viral web comic version of "His Face All Red" is the unfolding story of a man who swears he's murdered his brother, but his brother walks back into his life.
New Equipment Digest
You know that two sentence horror story that generally goes like this: "The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door..."
"Patient Zero" is like that, only longer and vastly more horrifying in its specificity and realism. Also, "the last man" is a 10-year-old boy who lives in a lab and just misses everybody who stops coming to visit him.
The story returns to Castle Rock, the cave where Stephen King projects his mental pictures onto the wall and when he's done they turn into money.
New Yorker
Like "Patient Zero," this is a tough read, not for its unsparing realism but its mythical resonance and graphic body horror. So, you know, enjoy.