{"code":"horror","header_2":"The scuttling, the screaming and the skulking.","header_1":"The Best Horror Stories of History","description":"The scariest short stories of history. Read or download. The Hand by Guy De Maupassant, the Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe, The Hound by H.P. Lovecraft.","stories":[{"story":"the-monkeys-paw","description":"*The Monkey’s Paw* by W. W. Jacobs is the origin of the notorious talisman itself. This granter of tainted wishes has taken on a mythos of its own, and everyone knows its rule: ‘Be careful what you wish for.’\nA man gifts a family with a strange artefact, but tells them of the tragic ending of its last owner. Ignoring the warning, the family asks for wealth immediately and pay the price the very next day."},{"story":"the-nameless-offspring","description":"From the horrid mind of Clark Ashton Smith comes a story of a secret, terrible child kept behind bars. *The Nameless Offspring* is a true horror to its core.\nOn a trip of discovery to the place of his birth, Henry Chaldane happens upon the his father’s old friend’s house, surrounding which there are stories of a terrible, hidden child."},{"story":"hypnos","description":"Leave it to Lovecraft to make sleep scary. Hypnos is one of the weird-fiction author’s explorations of dreams, and the unknown mysteries that lie within. \nTwo men use drugs to explore the barriers of unconsciousness during sleep. They go a little too far, and the consequences are horrifying for one of the pair, and worse than fatal for the other."},{"story":"the-hand","description":"Guy de Maupassant gives us a classic campfire ghost story of murderous vengeance.\nA stranger comes to town, bringing with him a souvenir hand that he claims he cut off from an enemy. He insists as well that the hand itself still seeks its revenge."},{"story":"the-black-cat","description":"In The Black Cat, Edgar Allan Poe masters the sense of paranoia and omens of bad luck. \nA man suspects his wife’s adopted black cat to be the source of all his almost paranormal bad luck. In desperation, he resolves to take the beast out by whatever means necessary."},{"story":"the-horrible","description":"*The Horrible* is a pair of stories within a story whose entire purpose is to define horror. They are more than just frightful and terrifying, they test one’s trust in human morality.\nAn army general tells to a table of men and women a pair of tales, one of soldiers deciding what to do with a captive elderly man thought to be a spy, and the other of men stranded in the desert and running low on food."},{"story":"the-hound","description":"*The Hound* is a prime example of karma manifested in a horror villain. The story follows a straightforward plot, but is fantastically executed by the dastardly Lovecraft. \nTwo graverobbers are chased by a panting and growling monstrosity after messing with the wrong corpse. "},{"story":"the-call-of-cthulhu","description":"Like Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu has had a longer-lasting renown than its author, having popped up in movies, T.V. videogames, books and tabletop games. The true horror of the monster, however, is best depicted in its original story, where Lovecraft did not merely make a good horror, but reinvented the genre and developed entirely new kinds of fear.\nA man inherits a manuscript from his uncle, describing cases of insanity and mania sprouting at the same time every year around the globe, along with dreams of a titanic, petrifying *Thing*."}],"title":"Best of Horror","subroute":"horror","authors":["wwjacobs","hplovecraft","edgarallanpoe","ambrosebierce","clarkashtonsmith"],"has_text":true,"quote":{"quote":"“For God’s sake don’t let it in.” * The Monkey’s Paw","code":"the-monkeys-paw"},"image_code":"the-monkeys-paw","image_alt":"Drawing of an old man and woman in a room looking very distressed.","collection_type":"genre"}