October isn’t October without reading some horror and getting your creepy crawlies on! Don’t have time for the long, building suspense of a good horror novel? Check out some of these horror short story collections instead!
Horror Stories By Leading Authors
You can’t talk about horror without bringing up the king of horror himself- Stephen King. King’s most recent short story collection is You Like It Darker, a collection of 12 short stories exploring both literal and metaphorical darkness. The stories in You Like It Darker will linger with you even after the lights turn off. King has published over a dozen short story collections, including titles such as Night Shift, Skeleton Crew, and If It Bleeds, among others.
A rising star in the world of horror, Eric LaRocca’s Things Have Gotten Worse Sine We Last Spoke and Other Misfortunes features three macabre short stories about the dark decline relationships can take. The stories in Eric LaRocca’s breakout collection follow two lonely women in an online chat room, a grieving couple isolated on a stormy island, and two antagonistic, not-as-they-seem neighbors. Another big name in horror right now is Nat Cassidy, nominated for the Bram Stoker Award in 2024 for his novella “Rest Stop”. Cassidy’s short story collection I Know A Place includes “Rest Stop” as well as 12 additional tales of horror. In Cassidy’s short fiction, the monsters lurking in the darkness are never what you expect.
Themed Horror Collections
These chilling collections combine the work of a number of successful horror writers under a single theme: ghosts, flash fiction, and isolation. Three very different themes that are sure to deliver frights in their own unique ways. Edited by the author famous for The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger features short stories from across the literary canon that summon ghosts and specters to the page in Ghostly. For each story, Niffenegger provides a brief background, why she included it in the collection, and how the work contributed to the evolution of the ghost story. From Gothic Horror to modern day, Ghostly presents a history of ghost stories that will haunt you.
Where Ghostly will take you on a comprehensive journey of hauntings, Tiny Nightmares is made entirely of fiction short enough to fill a few pages with short, dark thrills. Gathering scary stories by authors such as Samantha Hunt, Jac Jemc, Stephen Graham Jones, and more, Tiny Nightmares is full of quick reads that are sure to keep you up at night. Dan Coxon’s anthology Isolation: The Horror Anthology collects stories about the frightening moment when one faces something completely and totally alone. Coxon calls on a variety of leading horror fiction writers to evoke a sense of isolation and fear in these short stories.
Diverse Horror Stories
These anthologies take the horror genre and make it their own. Out There Screaming, edited by Jordan Peele, the filmmaker known for Get Out and Us, features 19 stories of Black Horror. Authors include Nnedi Okonorafor, N.K Jemisin, Cadwell Turnbull, and more contemporary Black authors. Out There Screaming combines the horror elements you know with unapologetic takes on social justice and the Black experience, featuring stories about supernatural traffic cops, freedom riders stranded in Alabama, a young girl in search of the Demon who killed her parents, and many more.
Sinophagia recognizes modern Horror fiction written by Chinese authors. Horror often relies on tropes that we know very, very well, shadowed hints dropped to warn the reader that a ghost is lurking in the house, that something isn’t quite right. Sinophagia challenges the horror we know so well with a Chinese perspective. Similarly, Never Whistle At Night is an anthology of Indigenous dark fiction. This wholly original collection of dark stories shapes Indigenous folklore into horror stories. A sequel to this anthology was published in August 2026 titled Back For Blood: Never Whistle At Night II. These anthologies provide new perspectives on horror that are sure to thrill.
