Chris Priestley's top 10 scary short stories for Halloween | Children's books. Ever since he was a teenager, Chris Priestley has loved unsettling and creepy stories, with fond memories of buying comics like House of Mystery and Strange Tales, watching classic BBC adaptations of MR James stories every Christmas and reading all manner of assorted weirdness from Edgar Allan Poe to Ray Bradbury.
He is the author of the Tales of Terror series which won the Dracula Society's Children of the Night Award for best book with a Gothic horror theme, and his latest book. Mister Creecher, picks up where Frankenstein left off. "When I was a teenager in the 1970s we did not really have books written especially for the teen market. When we felt like moving on from children's books, we moved into accessible adult fiction. 1. This is a superbly creepy and grotesque short story by the great Graham Greene. 2.
Surely any list of creepy short stories would have to include The Monkey's Paw? 3. I only read this quite recently, although I have it in several collections. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Awesome Stories. Classic Short Stories--Bibliography. This is a listing of the stories by author with mention of the books that the stories were taken from or mention of the person who so graciously supplied the story to Classic Short Stories. Bravo!! We have also added a word count for those who have a limited amount of time and would prefer to gauge the length of the story to the amount of time they have. Thomas Bailey Aldrich Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, Marjorie Daw, FAMILY BOOK OF BEST LOVED SHORT STORIES 189-207 (1954) Word Count: 7419.
Honore de Balzac de Balzac, Honore, A Passion in the Desert, A TREASURY OF SHORT STORIES 60-69 (1947) Word Count: 5565. Ambrose Bierce Bierce, Ambrose, Beyond the Wall, submitted by Annalee Elliot (1999) Word Count: 3448. Paul Bowles Bowles, Paul, In the Red Room, submitted by Cathy Word Count: 3690. Willa Cather Cather, Willa, Paul's Case, ANTHOLOGY OF FAMOUS AMERICAN STORIES 681-697 (1953) Word Count: 8970. Anton Pavlovich Checkhov Stuart Cloete Richard Connell Roald Dahl Richard Harding Davis Fielding Dawson O. 25 Favorite Short Stories. In his Devil’s Dictionary , Ambrose Pierce defined a novel as “a short story padded.” This is an all too apt description. The inability to prune a story to its essential story is an unfortunate quality shared by many modern writers and the primary reason that bookshelves are filled with bloated novels. William Faulkner once wondered if writers didn’t become novelists after having failed at the short story, “the most demanding form after poetry.”
Perhaps this is the reason there are even fewer great short stories than there are great novels. Since I don’t presume to know what works would fill the category of “greatest short fiction” (that’s a task better suited for Alan Jacobs), the following list of short stories is not intended to be representative of the best or most profound works in a particular category. Except for the first entry—which I would argue is one of the greatest of all times—the list is in no particular order. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.
Short Story. The 50 Best Short Stories of All Time. Short Stories.