Folk Horror
Old customs, rural communities and the land itself. In folk horror the danger comes from traditions that have outlived their reasons, or from something the locals have quietly agreed to live alongside, and the outsider learns the rules too late.
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Man-Size in Marble Classic
A young artist and his wife rent a cottage near a village church where, the housekeeper warns, the marble knights do not stay on their tombs on All Saints' Eve.
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The Ash-tree Classic
In 1690 a woman is hanged for witchcraft on evidence from the squire of Castringham Hall, and the great ash tree outside his window has been watching ever since.
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The Legend of Sleepy Hollow Classic
In a drowsy Dutch valley along the Hudson, a lanky schoolmaster courts a rich farmer's daughter and fears the ghost of a headless Hessian trooper.
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Walking Night
On the island where I married, there is one night at the end of October when every house sets its shoes out on the step, a pair for everyone inside and one pair more. In the morning the extra pair is gone, and that is a good year.
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The Maze
My family has cut a corn maze into the same eight acres every fall for thirty years. Every year, from the air, there's a path in it that none of us cut. My grandfather had one rule about it.
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Burn Morels
The spring after a wildfire, the burned forest fills up with morels, and pickers come from all over the West to pick them. The buyer at the Okanogan camp gave me eight rules on an index card. The one about the green tree is the only one I broke.
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Young Goodman Brown Classic
A young Puritan leaves his wife Faith for one night to keep an appointment in the forest outside Salem village.
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Next Row Over
My great-aunt picked huckleberries in the Washington Cascades every August for seventy years. She taught me two rules. If you hear someone picking in the next row over and nobody's there, don't answer when they call your name. And never eat from a bucket you didn't fill.
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A View from a Hill Classic
Borrowing a squire's old pair of field glasses on a country walk, a visitor sees a church tower that is not there.
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Thrawn Janet Classic
An old minister of a moorland parish is haunted by what happened when, as a young man, he hired a housekeeper the villagers called a witch.
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The Dead Valley Classic
As boys in Sweden, two friends took a shortcut over the hills and found a valley where nothing grows and nothing sounds.
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The Bowmen Classic
Outnumbered and facing annihilation on the Western Front, a British soldier murmurs an old Latin motto, and the battlefield changes.
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Metes and Bounds
A land surveyor is hired to retrace an 1884 deed in the hill woods before a sale. The deed carves out a single acre that is "not to be entered." Its corners are not where they ought to be.
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The Picture in the House Classic
Caught in a storm on a back road in rural New England, a traveller takes shelter in a decrepit farmhouse whose ancient owner loves one particular book.
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Novel of the Black Seal Classic
A governess tells how she came to work for a brilliant professor whose researches led him into the Welsh hills, and to a black stone seal.
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Covered Dish
Every September at the Grange hall harvest supper, there is one casserole on the long table that nobody brought, with a family's name on masking tape on the lid. I've been Grange secretary for twenty-two years. It's my job to deliver it.
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The Wolves of Cernogratz Classic
A newly rich family buys an old castle, and their elderly governess claims to know the legend of its wolves.
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The White People Classic
A conversation about the nature of true evil leads to a green notebook, the secret diary of a girl who learned strange things from her nurse.
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The Music on the Hill Classic
A newly married town woman persuades her husband to move to his remote family estate, where she mocks the old woodland superstitions.
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The Wendigo Classic
On a moose-hunting trip deep in the Canadian backwoods, a guide hears something calling his name from the wind above the trees.
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Telling the Bees
My grandmother kept bees in the Willamette Valley and taught me the old rule: when someone in the family dies, you have to go and tell them. She also taught me what the bees do if nobody tells them.
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The Man Who Went Too Far Classic
A young man living in a riverside village has devoted himself to communing with nature so completely that birds land on his shoulders.
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The Withered Arm Classic
A dairymaid abandoned by a farmer has a vivid nightmare about his new bride, and soon after the bride's arm begins to wither.