HALLOWEEN READS (PART 4)

Folk Horror has become a popular subgenre in recent years, thanks to films like THE WITCH and MIDSOMMAR. Cinematic ancestors include WITCHFINDER GENERAL, THE BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW, and THE WICKER MAN (the “holy trinity” of folk horror films), and literary forerunners include classic short stories by Arthur Machen (“The White People,” “The Three Imposters,” “The Great God Pan”), M.R. James (“The Ash-Tree,” “A Warning to the Curious,” “Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,”), and Algernon Blackwood (“The Willows,” “The Wendigo,” “The Man Whom the Trees Loved”), among others.

When I asked for some Halloween season reading recommendations, author Stephanie Ellis—who has successfully mined the subgenre in her novels The Five Turns of the Wheel (2022), The Woodcutter (2023), and Harrowfield (2025)—began with an attempt at a definition. Although many contemporary publishers slap the “folk horror” tag on just about anything, she says, the subgenre is defined by “aspects of isolation and strange belief, of landscape as character, and ritual.” She explains, “I would say the anthologies and collections I prefer tend to the more atmospheric, more rooted in the soil perhaps than the slasher fare that seems to be the main focus of marketing campaigns in the creepy season. This very much fits in with my view of what this time of year is. When I grew up, the U.S. trick or treat and all associated traditions hadn’t taken hold here [in Wales]. It was spooky tales in the village classroom, the carving of jack-o’-lanterns from turnips—not pumpkins, the close awareness of nights drawing in and seasons changing over. Walking isolated country lanes home in the ever-increasing darkness.” I find this descriptive setup very enticing, so I was excited to receive Stephanie’s reading recommendations, which go beyond the most obvious examples of folk horror. 

She highlights three different anthologies. At the top of the list is Damnable Tales: A Folk Horror Anthology (2022), edited by Richard Wells. It includes selections from the heavy hitters: Machen (“The Shining Pyramid”), James (“The Ash-Tree”), Blackwood (“The Tarn of Sacrifice”), and also Shirley Jackson (“The Summer People”), alongside plenty of deep cuts. I was excited to notice some overlap with The Dark Descent anthology—which also features “The Ash-Tree” and “The Summer People.” Both collections also include stories by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Edith Nesbit, Robert Aickman, Robert Louis Stevenson, Walter de la Mare, and John Collier. 

Stephanie Ellis’s second recommendation is editor Stephen Jones’s Mammoth Book of Folk Horror (2021), “a mix of classic and modern tales.” This anthology includes “The White People” by Machen, “Wailing Well” by M.R. James, and “Ancient Lights” by Blackwood, alongside more modern stories by Ramsey Campbell, Dennis Etchison, and Alison Littlewood. (Not to mention “The Hound” by H.P. Lovecraft and “Sticks” by Karl Edward Wagner.)

Finally, Stephanie recommends The Fiends in the Furrows (2018), edited by David T. Neal and Christine M. Scott, a collection of nine stories that are original to this book. Two stories in the collection—“The Jaws of Ouroboros” by Steve Toase and “Back Along the Old Track” by Sam Hicks—were selected for inclusion in Ellen Datlow’s annual Best Horror volume for 2018. The collection also includes a story by Stephanie Ellis, titled “The Way of the Mother.”

Another friend who made some comparable recommendations is Christi Nogle, author of the 2024 short story collection One Eye Opened in That Other Place. (I might mention that I met Stephanie Ellis and Christi Nogle in the same writing group about ten years ago—and I was stunned by the quality of the work from both writers. They each have a strong affinity for nuanced weird horror tales, and the talent to successfully create their own.) Christi also recommends three anthologies.

The first is American Fantastic Tales (2009), a two-volume (86-story!) collection edited by the late, great Peter Straub. The first volume is subtitled “Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps,” and it begins with Lisa Morton’s unholy trinity of Halloween authors: Washington Irving (“The Adventure of the German Student”), Edgar Allan Poe (“Berenice”), and Nathaniel Hawthorne (“The Haunted Mind”). Other titles include “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Dead Valley” by Ralph Adams Cram, “Luella Miller” by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and “The King of Cats” by Stephen Vincent Benet. Volume 1 ends with a sequence by the biggest names in weird tales: Robert E. Howard, Henry S. Whitehead, August Derleth, H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert Bloch. 

The second volume, “Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now,” includes an impressive array of modern American classics (“Smoke Ghost” by Fritz Leiber, “Prey” by Richard Matheson, “The Daemon Lover” by Shirley Jackson, “Don’t Look Now” by Daphne du Maurier,  “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” by Harlan Ellison, “The Events at Poroth Farm” by T.E.D. Klein), as well as some less obvious selections by canonical authors (“The April Witch” by Ray Bradbury, “A Short Guide to the City” by Peter Straub, “That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French” by Stephen King). The collection was published in 2009, so it also incorporates younger writers like Caitlin R. Kiernan, Poppy Z. Brite, Brian Evenson, Jeff VanderMeer, Joe Hill, Kelly Link, and Benjamin Percy. Hell of a lineup!

Christi Nogle’s second recommendation is The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (2011), another hundred-year literary odyssey featuring a whopping 110 selections. A number of greatest hits reappear here (“The Willows” by Algernon Blackwood, “Casting the Runes” by M.R. James, “The Dunwich Horror” by H.P. Lovecraft, “Smoke Ghost” by Fritz Leiber, “The Crowd” by Ray Bradbury, “It’s a Good Life” by Jerome Bixby, “The Summer People” by Shirley Jackson, “The Hospice” by Robert Aickman, “In the Hills, the Cities” by Clive Barker, etc.) but there’s so much more. Reader reviews show that other favorites are “The Brotherhood of Mutilation” by Brian Evenson, “Details” by China Mieville, “The Night Wire” by H.F. Arnold, “The Spider” by Hanns Heinz Ewers, and “The People on the Island” by T.M. Wright (one of my absolute favorite horror writers). This is a pricey collection, but…. Wow. I’m bummed that I don’t have a copy.

Christi Nogle’s third and final horror anthology recommendation is Mother: Tales of Love and Terror, a 2022 book that she edited herself. It includes 33 stories and poems, all published there for the first time, by celebrated modern authors such as Steve Rasnic Tem, Gemma Files, Brian Evenson, Hailey Piper, John Langan, Christina Sng, and Gabino Iglesias. 

At this point, honestly, I’m feeling overwhelmed by the sheer number of anthology recommendations—but there’s still one more. Ivy Grimes, who gathered her own short fiction in the 2024 collection Glass Stories, praises The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories, saying, “Many of those ghost stories explore divides between city and country, rich and poor, and find spookiness where there’s alienation and othering. Good stuff.” Reader reviews highlight “Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” by M.R. James, “The Empty House” by Algernon Blackwood, “The Upper Berth” by F. Marion Crawford, “The Judge’s House” by Bram Stoker,” “The Phantom Coach” by Amelia B. Edwards, and “The Cigarette Case” by Oliver Onions. I was also interested to find Edith Nesbit’s “Man-Size in Marble” listed among the table of contents—because that story also appears in the book I’m reading right now.

A few years ago, I stumbled upon a hardback copy of August Derleth’s 1944 anthology Sleep No More at a library book sale. This anthology is so old that the editor’s introduction reads: “Conservatively speaking, there are currently available at least twenty collections of tales of the macabre, of horror and terror and the supernatural, of ghosts and things that go bump in the night. And most of them [are] good collections. So that one might well ask, why yet another?”

Just imagine. Only twenty or so horror anthologies in print. Wouldn’t that make it easier to pick some stories to read as Halloween season rolls around? 

Sleep No More celebrates many of the same writers whose work reappears in major anthologies today: M.R. James (“Count Magnus”), Algernon Blackwood (“The Occupant of the Room”), H.P. Lovecraft (“The Rats in the Walls”), Clark Ashton Smith (“The Return of the Sorcerer”), Robert W. Chambers (“The Yellow Sign”), Robert E. Howard (“The Black Stone”), Robert Bloch (“The Mannikin”), etc. One lesser-known story that really stood out to me was “The House of Sounds” by M.P. Shiel. Previously, I had known Shiel only as the author of the postapocalyptic novel The Purple Cloud, which Stephen King has cited as a source of inspiration for The Stand. (And now that I’m thinking about it, The End of the World as We Know It is another recent horror anthology that is lurking on my TBR pile…. But I digress.) 

“The House of Sounds” is a gothic tale, reminiscent of Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” but written in an ornate style that reminded me of Abraham Merritt, an early inspiration for H.P. Lovecraft. At one point, Shiel’s descriptive passages became so involved that my imagination choked—and I did something that instantly felt very Halloween 2026. I asked an AI bot to visualize a few scenes for me, in the style of artists from the period in which the story was written (late 1800s). The result seems like an amusing place to conclude this little journey through fear. Happy Halloween!