Reading Report Addenda: “Horror MAYhem 2025”

For fun, I’m participating in “Horror MAYhem: Decades Of Dread” a Book Tube event where they read horror stories from several decades. I’m not on Book Tube so I’m just posting the results here, and I’m starting early, in every sense of the word. For completists, I’ll post the whole list here. Also, I’m taking advantage of the idea to read stuff by writers I really hadn’t read much of before, like Henry James and Blackwood. And, in keeping with the idea of reading one story for a decade (well, one or more!) I’m starting earlier, in the Nineteenth Century!

Speaking of starting; since these Reports cover the period from the twentieth to the twentieth (or thereabouts) I started Horror MAYhem in the last part of April!

And one more note: the event this year is dedicated to the memory of Book Tuber Scott Bryant (of “The Bookish Bryants”) and I’ll thank them for getting me to getting around to reading some of these stories I’ve been meaning to get to!

1832

“Bon-Bon” or “The Bargain Lost,” by Edgar Allen Poe. Counts as part of my Poe Project too. Read it! More humorous than horrific, but the description of the Devil and his devouring of souls is pretty creepy!

1840’s

“A Confession Found In A Prison In The Time Of Charles The First” by Charles Dickens (1840) Read it!

1850’s

“To Be Read At Dusk” by Charles Dickens. (1852) Read it!

1860’s

“The Romance Of Certain Old Clothes” by Henry James (1868) Read it! Don’t think I’d ever read James before. Spooky, even though I knew how it was going to end!

1870s

“The Haunted Valley” by Ambrose Bierce (1871) read it. A little creepy. An anti-Chinese bigot gets his comeuppance. Bierce’s first story. Followed it by reading Bierce’s much better “Chicamauga,” from about 1889.

Read Julian Hawthorne’s “The Mysterious Case Of My Friend Browne.” Genuinely spooky and ties into a real-life tragedy from 1871, the year he published it. (From the collection “The Rose Of Death and Other Mysterious Delusions.”)

1880s

“The Body Snatcher” by Robert Louis Stevenson (1884) Read it!

“Chicamauga” by Ambrose Bierce. Read it (maybe re-read it!) Bierce has a child encounter the horrors of a Civil War battle’s aftermath. Bierce needed no supernatural trappings to invoke a real-life nightmare.

Started reading another Julian Hawthorne tale: His novella “Kildhurm’s Oak,” which I’ll probably finish in June.

1890’s

“The Repairer Of Reputations” by Rbt. W. Chambers (1895) Read it!

1900’s

“The Leather Funnel” by Arthur Conan Doyle (1902) This was a re-read.

“The Empty House” by Algernon Blackwood (1906) Read it!

1910’s

“How It Happened” by Arthur Conan Doyle (1913) Read it, a re-read!

“Ancient Lights” by Algernon Blackwood (1912) Read it! Plays on Blackwood’s knowledge of the woods and fields, with a bit of the flavor of Manly Wade Wellman.

1920’s

“The Woman Of the Wood” by A. Merritt (1926) Read it!

1930’s

“The Citadel Of Darkness” by Henry Kuttner (1939) Read it!

1940’s

“Call Him Demon” by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore (1946) NOTE: This will be a re-read. Read it!

1950’s

“The Summer People” by Shirley Jackson (1950) Read it! The beginning reminded me of Nesbit’s “Man-Sized In Marble,” but Jackson’s story takes the very normal and turns it progressively darker.

The list was the planned stuff, but I decided to also read some selections from “Tropical Chills,” the 1988 horror anthology edited by Tim Sullivan which finds fear in the heat and sultry night and day of warmer climes in ten stories written for the book and four reprints.

“Getting Up” by Jack Dann and Barry N. Malzberg is a political horror story with thinly-disguised political figures.

Read Pat Cadigan’s “It Was the Heat.” A fine chiller!

“Zeke,” by the anthology’s editor Tim Sullivan. An unexpectedly poignant tale of alone-ness and alienation which first appeared in the old “Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine” in 1981. It not only references the series but it presages a certain movie by a year. And it was nominated for the Nebula Award!

(I looked Sullivan up; he passed away about a year ago. A fine writer.)

Read some Frank Belknap Long that I don’t think I’d read. “Second Night Out” is a monster story and a good one! (It would have fit well in “Tropical Chills.”)

And I read “The Parasite” by Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle is one of my favorite writers, and I say more about this story in my May/June Reading Report.

So that was my Horror MAYhem report, plus the reading list stretching over 100 years. (I didn’t read everything on the original list I had; like “The Turn Of the Screw” by Henry James or Blackwood’s “The Willows.” Neither of which I have ever read!)

Oh well, there are always more reads!