Tales of Horror and the Supernatural

In the mood for some fictional scares? You’ll want to read these six classics with the lights turned on. Daphne du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now collects some of the author’s most unnerving and evocative short fiction, including two stories later adapted to film by Nicolas Roeg and Alfred Hitchcock. With an introduction by Stephen King, William Sloane’s The Rim of Morning unites elements of mystery, science fiction, and cosmic horror in a truly haunting pair of novels.

In Jeremias Gotthelf’s The Black Spider, the devil preys on a bucolic farming village in the form of a giant arachnid. Thomas Tryon’s The Other narrates the tale of two identical twins, one of whom begins to terrorize the peaceful New England town that they call home.

Compulsory Games assembles over a dozen of Robert Aickman’s famed “strange stories,” each “a small masterpiece of unease and psychological perplexity” (Kirkus). Another story collection, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s Autobiography of a Corpse, gathers several of the celebrated Soviet writer’s most mind-bending and darkly comic fables.