Saturday, October 29, 2011

Twenty Haunting Tales For Halloween

In A Dim Room...Lord Dunsany

The Boy Who Drew Cats...Lafcadio Hearn

The Canterville Ghost...Oscar Wilde

The Water Ghost...John Kendrick Bangs

The Lonesome Place...August Derleth

The Haunted Dolls' House...M. R. James

The Whistling Room...William Hope Hodgeson

Feathertop...Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Devil And Daniel Webster...Stephen Vincent Benet

The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow...Washington Irving

The Monster Maker...William C. Morrow

The Haunted And The Haunters...Lord Lytton

Markheim...Robert Louis Stevenson

A Terribly Strange Bed...Wilkie Collins

An Account Of Some Strange Disturbances In Aungier Street...J. Sheridan Le Fanu

The Phantom Coach...Amelia B. Edwards

Captain Murderer...Charles Dickens

In The Vault...H. P. Lovecraft

The Monkey's Paw...W. W. Jacobs

The Fall Of The House Of Usher...Edgar Allan Poe


Twenty tales tailored by my own (rather old-fashioned) taste. This is the anthology I would like to see put together and published; they are not particularly about "terror" or "horror" but are what I would term "haunting." Both in the usual sense, and in the sense of lingering in the memory and emotions, long after the tale is told. Of course, you could glut the list with many by Lovecraft, Poe, and James, but I thought I should limit it to one apiece.

3 comments:

AlanDP said...

I just read "Markheim" recently from some anthology I have laying around. I would've called it strange rather than haunting. "The Lonesome Place" and "The Haunted Dolls' House" are supremely haunting, though. I suppose "Canterville" is also haunting, but in a different way.

Babel said...

"Enoch" by Robert Bloch, and "The Troll" by T.H. White are a couple of standouts that also spring to mind.

Brer said...

"Markheim" is peculiar, with it's hints of angels and consciences; I think its atmosphere of murder, isolation, and melancholy qualify it for inclusion, plus I wanted something by Stevenson, but not "The Bodysnatchers."

I had forgotten "Enoch" and "The Troll;" make that "Twenty-Two Tales" (or is that title taken?)!