Well it’s Halloween (or All Hallow’s Eve, or Samhain, or even All Saint’s Eve for some) and it’s the climax of spooky season so I figured what better way to celebrate than an all horror round up of some short speculative fiction I’ve been reading and enjoying lately. I don’t recommend too much horror usually (though I do some, and do recommend a fair bit of dark stories), though I do enjoy it quite a lot. I simply feel that horror is hard to recommend broadly because by it’s very nature it is likely to be upsetting or uncomfortable to some, if not many, and require a fair bit of caveats. Tis the spooky season though, so it is the perfect time to go all in on the genre. I will try to call out specific content warnings for each story, and not all are equally disturbing or disturbing in the same ways (and that of course is a completely subjective opinion – the problem with horror!), but please consider this fair warning. Otherwise, if you’d like to cap off the season of celebrating ghosts and goblins and the macabre I have some great suggestions for you (with apologies to any authors who don’t consider their recommended stories to be horror, I feel that all the below are at the least horror-adjacent enough to fit a Halloween themed round up):

“Come In, Children” by Ai Jiang from Hexagon Magazine Issue 10

Our first story gives us a spin on the old witch in the forest who preys on children tale. This old witch finds herself contending with the twin, and intertwined, problems of a modern world outside her dark forest and a sister who has chosen it over traditional witchy ways. Told from the perspective of the witch Yejin, who gets by on selling memory erasing magic to city folk in exchange for small amounts of the life force that sustains her now that she’s given up on taking everything from the occasional lost child that wanders too close to her home. She isn’t happy with the new way of doing things nor the choices her sister has made that compelled her to give up preying on kids nor the fact that her sister doesn’t even seem to acknowledge or understand the sacrifice she’s made for her. Things start getting drastic, and very dark, though when she tries to take matters into her own hands and eventually everyone will learn just how dangerous memory magic can be.

This is a really good take on one of the most classic scary story tropes we have and I particularly like how Ai Jiang brings the importance of memories, and what can happen when you mess with them, into it. A perfect Halloween Round Up kick off. Content warning that it is heavily indicated that children have been and may again be harmed/killed by Yejin and things get dark. This is not a misunderstood old witch in the woods, but very much a dangerous one.

“Choke” by Suyi Davies Okungbowa from Tor.com

For our second story we’re moving to a much more modern and understated kind of horror. This one is all about growing dread and unease and the suffocating weight of white evangelical supremacy, which sometimes wears a friendly smile and wears you down with microaggression piled on microaggression. Were this story to be made into a film it would fit quite comfortably into Jordan Peele’s hands, especially when the other face of white supremacy threatens to make an appearance, still smiling, but not in ‘maybe-they-just-don’t-know-better-really-they-mean-well way.

Told in the second person our protagonist is well served by having voices of their ancestors in their ears to provide some warning, though whether those warnings can be accurately understood in time is a question. A very good story that layers on the uncomfortableness bit by bit until you suddenly become aware of just how tense you have become. A great mode of horror, which isn’t only a realm of overt violence and blood.

“A Song of Violence” by Bibi Osha from The Dark Issue 89

Now we move to a story that I would say comfortably fits into the cosmic horror slice of the horror family. In fact, while reading this I could not help but be reminded at times of a modern cosmic horror giant – “The Ballad of Black Tom” by Victor LaValle. There are plenty of similar elements to bring that reminiscence such as the importance of music to the story, the main character’s connection to his father, the main character choosing an ancient and terrible power over the society that shuns him and the people in it who hurt him, but Bibi Osha’s tale is very much it’s own thing with plenty of key differences as well. The scale of this story is longer for one, starting when our MC Mamo Wajin is a young boy and ending when he is a young man. There are more and more complicated family dynamics explored here than in LaValle’s tale and the problems Mamo faces from society are not rooted in white supremacy and racism (indeed I’m pretty sure there isn’t a white face to be found in this society).

This is more a story about a boy with talents inherited from his father to speak with beings beyond the mortal world and songs inside himself that can connect them to our world who finds himself ostracized and bullied over an accident that happens when he is seven and the simple fact that he is different. When a voice from beneath the earth offers friendship and aid in exchange for his help in return it should be no surprise that he accepts and as most of the people around him either treat him crueler or find themselves happy to profit from him regardless of the cost it should probably be no wonder that a friendship and deal with a powerful entity seems more and more the way to go. Great story, with all that wonderful creepy comsmic horror vibes in a very different package than you’ve probably seen before.

“Old Solomon’s Eyes” by Cheryl S. Ntumy from FIYAH Magazine Issue 24

I only sort of set out to find stories of all different flavors of horror but I do seem to have managed to do it all the same. This feels very much like a fairy tale or myth kind of story but with some very disturbing imagery as the villages local demon steals body parts from those that offend her building a bizarre hodgepodge of of her victims’ pieces. (Give this one to Guillermo del Toro to film, he’d have a field day.)

Despite the disturbing imagery though it’s not gory at all. When the demon steals someone’s feet or Old Solomon’s eyes there is no blood or otherwise open wound. The victim lives, just, without the take part. As I say it definitely has a fairy tale kind of feel to it and than includes in the voice of the prose and there is a happy-ish ending to be had though, like any good fairy tale, there is a lesson to be learned too.

This story comes from the latest issue of FIYAH Magazine that was themed “Horrors & Hauntings” so it has several other Halloween appropriate stories in its pages but, as always, this one (and the rest of them) aren’t available to read for free, you’ll have to purchase the issue, but FIYAH, and all the magazines in these round ups are both worth and need the support if you can.

“Sharp Things, Killing Things” by A.C. Wise from Nightmare Magazine Issue 121

The penultimate story in this Halloween round up is the most straight up horror of horror stories I am offering you up, as it should be coming from the pages of Nightmare Magazine and author A.C. Wise. Strong content warnings on this one as there are many deaths by suicide in many ways contained within.

This dark tale gives us some familiar American horror ideas: small town nowhere, a closed factor from better days, bored youth who would love nothing better than to leave but can’t really imagine ever doing so. The story focuses on a group of boys in this town who spend most of their time drinking and smoking pot in friends’ basements or driving around largely aimlessly, but the scope includes their entire community. Things start weird right off the bat when they spot a billboard that wasn’t there before and won’t be again later advertising razors is a very messed up way. The billboard disturbs them, as do the deaths and other unsettling signs that start cropping up, and you’d think these guys are either our protagonists or victims or a mix of both, but this story is doing something a bit more unusual than that.

Instead A.C. Wise is exploring ideas of collective guilt and collective responsibility. About how the things they and those around them do in the face of small town malaise and small town small mindedness might not have been the things that hurt others but, then again, they sure could have been, couldn’t they? Whether active “boys will be boys” bullying or simply choosing not to notice the uncomfortable around them the lines between what is causing the traumas in their town by the old Winston factory to overflow into death after death only blur and get harder to figure out as the story goes on. This one should definitely land right for anyone looking for some real scary and disturbing horror.

“To The Tooth” by Amy Nagopaleen from PseudoPod Episode 834

Another straight up horror from a horror venue this story probably has the goriest “on-screen” death of all the stories I’m recommending to you here (some don’t have death at all) but I’d have to say this is also the most fun of the stories, assuming your idea of fun includes some good old horror. If I had to assign a genre flavour here I’d say this was closest to the B-grade monster features and the horror of the 80s. I absolutely do not make these comparisons as a comment on quality but on aesthetics (besides, I love those kinds of films) and I think you’ll understand when I tell you well get wonderful lines like, “spinning him into a huge human rotini.”

Here we have someone coming face to face (sort of) with an incredibly unconventional monster in their apartment that simply seems intent on eating them and the fight to survive. It’s fast paced, relatively short and lots of fun, again, in that ‘the monster just crunched that dude up’ kind of fun. If that’s your jam than I can’t recommend this one enough.

And that’s it for this week and my first ever all-horror (or close enough) short speculative fiction round up. As always, if you’d like to see the full list of previous Roundups and the authors included in each you can find that here. I hope to be back in a week with another roundup. If you find something you enjoy reading in my recommendations I hope you’ll shout that story out!