"hello, all. dally eek and i have been sitting around for the past, oh, i don't know, hour or so, coming up with a little Halloween gift for you all. we've tried to think of 13 truly excellent short horror stories, both old and new. some of them are well known--stories you know you ought to have read but may never have--and some not so well known, but equally brilliant. between the two of us, as longtime horror fans, we can pretty much guarantee that, if you read all these stories and don't like a single one of them, then horror is not to your taste, and you can move on with a clear conscience. here, then, for your delectation, are 13 of the best.

• ‘The Willows’, Algernon Blackwood
• ‘The Companion’, Ramsey Campbell
• ‘The Lottery’, Shirley Jackson
• ‘The Next In Line’, Ray Bradbury
• ‘The Graveyard Rats’, Henry Kuttner
• ‘The Mezzotint’, M R James
• ‘The Colour Out of Space’, H P Lovecraft
• ‘Night They Missed the Horror Show’, Joe R Lansdale
• ‘Graveyard Shift’, Richard Matheson
• ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’, Flannery O’Connor
• ‘The Box’, Jack Ketchum
• ‘On the River’, Guy de Maupassant
• ‘The Upper Berth’, F. Marion Crawford