...A Buffet of Short Horror...25OCT14...

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote horror.  I didn't know this until I was randomly looking up my favorite authors and relating them to horror.  Assuredly, I came across The Body Snatcher, first published in 1884, as part of a magazine extra.  The story follows a pair of questionable medical students that make sure they never run low on cadeavors for their employer.  It is based on the real-life case of the Burke and Hare murders.  Murder as a business came long before Izzy Azalea - this pair made sure that sixteen bodies made it to the nefarious Doctor Robert Knox.

No these are gone....GONE!!!  This is
the greatest horror story of modern times.
That had treacherous murder.  But raspberry
donuts.  Raspberry...donuts.

M.R. James wrote The Tractate Middoth and was published in 1911 in a second collection of ghost stories.  Middoth recounts the deathbed story of a dying man.  Some twenty years earlier the titular book is sought out by one John Eldred, but a ghost takes the book before it can be retrieved.  The ghost is a protector of sorts, as the pages hold within it the inheritance.  There is vengeance from beyond the grave for Eldred.  The story has been adapted several times on British television.

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson (1948), is one of the most famous horror stories of its time, with a theme very well known today.  Not to spoil the ending, but as the name suggests, a small town holds a yearly lottery.  From it, a name is chosen and the fun begins.  This theme has been copied several times since.  There was an episode of Sliders in fact that ran the lottery directly from an ATM.  There's also little known movies like The Hunger Games.

Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is well known, in fact being one of the earliest pieces of American literature to have survived in popularity since it was first published in 1820.  Irving also wrote Rip Van Winkle.  When Disney started to adapt Legend they found the running time not long enough for a feature, so it was packaged along with Wind in the Willows during WWII.

Mark Twain's A Ghost Story comes to us from his 1875 Sketches New and Old.  As Twain is a man of sincere wit, especially as it comes to the pitiable type, he delivers in spades here.

Starburst Flavored Candy Corn

Like Stevenson, Charles Dickens' Three Ghost Stories is an epic writer, and the supernatural is a natural fit for his style.  Dickens and Poe can be considered on the same playing field in many respects.  In Three, the most popular of them is The Signal Man, but The Haunted House and The Trial for Murder are just as effective.  In Signal, a railway signal-man tells the story of sighting a ghost, each time preceding a disaster upon the tracks.  It calls back a disaster five years before Dickens wrote the story, the Clayton Tunnel Disaster in 1861.

The Phial of Dread by Fitz Hugh Ludlow.

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Zots - never had them.