The tale of the headless horseman has perhaps inspired more pop culture re-creations than any of these other stories. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by Washington Irving It’s admittedly not a particularly scary story - it’s more about intuition than the macabre - but it’s classic Dickens, and provides a bit of a shock ending. In telling the story of a lost young boy who happens to wander across a battalion of injured soldiers, Bierce manages to turn the idea that “war is hell” from vague platitude into visceral twist in the guts. While “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” is his most famous of these stories (and is considered by many scholars to be one of the greatest in American literature), it’s “Chickamauga” that has stuck with me the most. Where as many of these others are pretty Victorian, Bierce wrote with a uniquely American pen. Bierce’s frontier-like voice is unique in short stories, especially within this horror/supernatural genre. His entire collection of Civil War tales is worth reading. Combine that with the twist endings that Bierce is known for, and you end up with some truly jaw-dropping tales. While the supernatural elements found in his non-war stories can certainly elicit fear, the realistic nature of the fictional Civil War stories only adds to their horror. I read a couple dozen of Bierce’s stories and the most impactful, without a doubt, were those contained in his Civil War Stories collection. Despite the minimal time commitment, there’s a good chance they’ll enduringly haunt your imagination. All can be read free online, usually in the span of 10 minutes or so, with the longest only taking a half hour. Below you’ll find 10 of my favorite classic tales of the macabre. It’s for this reason that in reading dozens and dozens of scary short stories, old and new-ish alike, I quickly realized I was far more drawn to the former. When writing in the genre of the macabre (meaning, in art, that there’s a grim and deathly quality to it), many authors - especially those of the late 19th and early 20th centuries - took advantage of the chance to touch on the nature of fear: how it grips our conscience how heroes, cowards, and villains deal with it and how the scariest things in life aren’t monsters and mummies, but the darkest shadows of our own hearts. This is true not only in the way they subtly build suspense by hinting at what lurks off center stage and around a corner, rather than describing it directly, but in the way they often use a horror-filled tale to explore deeper moral and philosophical issues. Short stories can be read in less time than it takes to watch a movie (or read a book), and offer a potent dose of fright, providing chills that are also frequently more nuanced and layered. While the visceral frights of these terror-inducing flicks can certainly be fun, by my lights, the best way to tap into a seasonal mood of dread and apprehension is not via cinema but the printed page - particularly the short story. To get into a spooky state of mind this time of year, many will turn to watching horror movies - slasher films filled with plenty of blood, guts, and chainsaws.
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