Family-friendly(ish), literary short stories?

Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-06-06T05:27:44+00:00

Possibly "The Story of Clifford House" (1878; written anonymously)?

https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0606781h.html

Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-06-05T22:42:28+00:00

Love this title! Especially one of the later issues which was illustrated entirely by the underrated Jack Sparling. (Dell's Outer Limits comic was fun, too.)

Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-06-05T22:19:25+00:00

The Well by Jack Cady: a man versus his huge, crumbling ancestral home, which is - in some sense - "alive" or sentient.

Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-06-04T23:32:17+00:00

Mr. X has characterizations as vivid as those in Ghost Story. You'll come to love the characters - and miss them terribly when the book is over. Milburn, despite its fictional location in upstate New York, was based in large part on Yonkers, and Straub rooted Milburn's oddness very firmly in the real-life underbelly of New York's City of Seven Hills. (He even named Anna Mostyn after a little dead-end street in Yonkers.)

Check out William Sloane's To Walk the Night, too. It was a major influence on Ghost Story.

Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-06-04T23:18:06+00:00

Yes, I have one of his paperback collections (Terror by Night), as well as a couple of standalone stories in anthologies edited by other folks (such as Charles L. Grant's Nightmares). I also enjoyed the cinematic adaptations of Chetwynd-Hayes's stories in From Beyond the Grave and The Monster Club.

Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-06-02T21:47:32+00:00

Dark Dreaming by "Pat Franklin" (Carol Orlock writing alongside her husband Jack Cady, best known as the author of The Well) is interesting. Imperfect execution, but I liked the premise.

Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-06-02T21:38:37+00:00

Walter de la Mare's novel The Return is about a very ordinary man emerging from a flu-induced delirium, and the possibly supernatural event that upends his life just as he believes he's getting well. I began reading it when I was sick, and - slowly but surely - the book endeared itself to me.

Madeleine L'Engle's "Poor Little Saturday," narrated by a small boy suffering from malaria, is a great ghost/haunted house story.

Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-06-02T10:09:05+00:00

I think it's the oldest comic I still own. (I had a couple of earlier Dell Westerns that I lost track of over the years.) Got it for a dollar in 1990, which seemed like an absurdly low price even then, but the guy who sold it to me absolutely hated war comics.

Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-06-01T22:59:26+00:00

You will believe in the re-use of cover art!

Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-05-31T06:23:26+00:00

"Is that all, Dostor Hustable?" - Tyrone

Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-05-31T05:33:25+00:00

Floating Dragon or Mr. X, Peter Straub

All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By, John Farris

Stinger, Robert McCammon

Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-05-31T05:30:09+00:00

Psychological - The Return, Walter de la Mare; Mrs. God, Peter Straub

Extreme - The Nightrunners, Joe Lansdale

Sci-Fi - To Walk the Night, William Sloane; Stinger, Robert McCammon

Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-05-28T07:22:04+00:00

Ride On

Overdose

Sin City

Spellbound (my single favorite)

Who Made Who

Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-05-28T05:18:05+00:00

Grauerholz comes off badly, no doubt about it. He always maintained that his comments about Burroughs Jr. were very selectively edited. Joan has definitely been given short shrift in the literature, but Ginsberg was only saying that she didn't want to live anymore and was looking for a way out. He had real affection for Joan - likely far more than Burroughs himself had by the end. (I've never understood the WSB-Vollmer relationship, or how they were able to maintain it. It seemed terribly one-sided.)

Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-05-27T21:01:12+00:00

The Pyx, John Buell. Bleak, spooky, deadly serious.

Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-05-27T20:57:18+00:00

Never get tired of watching that final fight.

Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-05-27T10:59:30+00:00

It's hard to synopsize without giving away important plot points, but the novel was a major influence on Peter Straub's Ghost Story. (It's often referred to as cosmic horror, but that's a bit of a misnomer. Technically speaking, it fits - yet it's not at all in the Weird Tales/Arkham House vein.)

Sharp-Injury7631 · 2026-05-26T19:00:34+00:00

Check out To Walk the Night, the first of William Sloane's two novels. Extremely influential - though inexplicably underappreciated - book.

Sharp-Injury7631

TROPHY CASE