The only horror tales you need to read

Robert Aickman, the third best horror writer of all time, once said: "There are only about thirty or forty first-class ghost stories in the whole of western literature." If it weren’t for Aickman’s contributions, forty would probably be on the high side.

There are many reasons why a memorable horror story is so tricky to pull off, but right now I have no interest in mining my remarkable brain for the answers.

Halloween is almost here, and it comes but once a year, so here is a nearly complete list of the only horror tales you need to bother with (some are novellas/novelettes, so I am bending the rules a bit). I am going to leave out Poe and Stevenson because they are taught in school, so people get plenty of exposure to them. I’m trying to highlight writers that non-horror fans might not otherwise encounter.

Lovecraft

The Call of Cthluhu
The Music of Erich Zann
The Outsider
The Shadow Over Innsmouth
The Colour Out of Space

Robert Aickman

Ringing the Changes
The Hospice
The Cicerones
Meeting Mr. Millar
Your Tiny Hand is Frozen

Thomas Ligotti

My Work Is Not Yet Done
Purity
Our Temporary Supervisor

Algernon Blackwood

The Willows (Lovecraft called this the finest weird tale ever, and I can’t disagree).
The Wendigo

M.R. James

“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”
Casting the Runes

Mary Elisabeth Counselman

The Black Stone Statue

The Three Marked Pennies

Metamorphosis by Kafka (Kafka is obviously taught in school, but this is a great weird tale that is often soiled by shaky literary analysis, thus robbing virgin readers of potential enjoyment).

Mimic by Donald Wolheim

Night Wire by HF Arnold

Nackles by Curt Clark (AKA Donald Westlake)

It's a Good Life by Jerome Bixby

The People of the Pit by Abraham Merritt

The Canal by Everil Worrell

The Voice of the Beach by Ramsey Campbell

N by Stephen King.

The Geezenstacks by Fredric Brown

Pigeons from Hell by Robert E. Howard

Robert Aickman

There is a very highly regarded weird fiction writer named Robert Aickman (he called his tales "strange stories"). He published 48 during his lifetime, and although many fellow writers and weird fiction aficionados rank him among the absolute best weird fiction writers of the 20th Century, his books are very hard to find. Even buying them online means prices starting at $100.

I have seen Aickman referenced time and time again, but figured I'd probably never read him.

Then it hit me...might the New York Public Library possess a few copies?

Sure enough, they have some of his books available to read on the premises.

So I went...

The first book I requested...had been mysteriously moved off the premises. How appropriate.

The second one...was there.

As soon as I started reading his tale "The School Friend",  I knew I'd found a man who was absolutely his own writer; a writer in the same league as Poe or Lovecraft. His stories are unlike most weird or supernatural stories. They have very little action. Instead, their effect is more cumulative. Every sentence has some unsettling detail, like a reference to a bed that looked like the sleeper had been awakened very suddenly, which slowly taps the amygdala.


Aickman created atmosphere through meticulous, unconventional detail. It is like with each story he was building a Jenga tower little by little. Then suddenly there is a moment where things first begin to really feel wrong, where one of those Jenga pieces is yanked out. Like the moment in "Never Visit Venice" where the women says offhandedly that they're headed to where "the real danger" is. That's when the Jenga tower first loses one of its pieces.

But unlike most weird fiction, when a piece or pieces is removed from an Aickman tower, the tower doesn't collapse like you'd expect. Instead, Aickman's towers just wobble and wobble, leaving you to wonder what the hell is keeping it up...

It is refreshing when an artist lives up to the hype. If you care about this sort of thing and have access to Aickman's work, he is worth checking out.

Here is an radio adaptation of one of his most famous stories: http://archive.org/details/Nightfall-cbcRadioProgram-episodesMp3Format

It is episode 17, "Ringing the Changes".