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I have written a number of articles detailing short stories of several great horror writers over the past two years and have enjoyed nearly all of them. This year I thought I would assemble ten ghastly tales that seem tailor made for the Halloween month. The stories that made this list were included because they had great atmosphere, terrifying supernatural happenings and some malevolent entity at work. I limited my choices to one per author. The fact that most of them do not actually take place at Halloween is immaterial. The overall ambience and themes contained within them perfectly coincide with the most haunted of months. They are not listed in any order other than by their publishing date, as I love them all too much to rank them otherwise.

As noted in my previous article about J. Sheridan LeFanu, he was the editor of The Dublin University Magazine for many years and contributed numerous stories to it.  Some of these were published anonymously.  One such tale is “My Aunt Margaret’s Adventure” (1864).  The story was only printed the one time and until this year had not been reprinted since.   Several years after its publication, M.R. James credited the tale to LeFanu of whom he was a big fan.  The story is different than most of LeFanu’s work, in large part because it lacks an element of the supernatural to it.

Abraham Merritt was born in New Jersey on January 20^th, 1884.  He studied law but eventually became an editor for The American Weekly magazine, which he worked at for many years.  He was exceptionally well paid and used his money to travel the world, bringing back many exotic weapons and artifacts from around the world.  He wrote fiction on the side and produced short stories and novels in the fantasy, science-fiction and horror genres. 

For this month’s article I wanted to return to one I’ve written about before.  M.R. James is one of my absolute favorite writers.  In my previous article (found at http://www.vintagehorror.com/node/21) I spent more time on his life but didn’t go into much detail on his stories.  With this one I will not retread his history but instead focus on some of his lesser-known tales of terror.  More than likely I will return to the brilliant works of M.R.

The Mysterious Flame is a chapbook published by Dead Letter Press.  It pays homage to the gothic pulp classics from long ago.  The main character of this tale is a golem made of hardened clay named Barnabus.  Barnabus must hide from humans who always react with fear at his inhuman appearance, but secretly he longs for their companionship.  When six young want-to-be archeologists breach

If you follow the link below or click on the Horror Stories link to the side and then click on Matt Cowan, you can read my short story "Midnight in 411".  I wrote this story to submit to an anthology that was interested in horror tales set in a hotel.  All of the stories were going to take place in the same hotel so you really couldn't describe too much outside of the room in order to maintain consistancy.  My story was not accepted but I still always liked it.  So I'm posting it here, with Jim's help of course (thanks Jim!).  Please feel free to leave comments on it below and thanks for reading it.  
Matt Cowan 

Saturday mornings meant two things when I was a kid: Cartoons, and a good size bowl of sugar cereal.  Nothing went better together than Peanut Butter Crunch and the Superfriends, except maybe Lucky Charms and Looney Tunes.  No, Peanut Butter Crunch trumps all.  And there were lots of good cartoons back then as well, seeing as how the big three networks each filled the morning with them.  So there I’d sit, surrounded by whatever toys held my interest that day, splitting my attention between that whopping 19” television and whatever fantasy world my toys were leading me in to.  But that was Saturday morning, and VHF.  Things changed with a thunk! around noon.