Mysteries and suspense come in all flavors, including the supernatural and paranormal. Considered cross-genre, these stories give you the thrill of detection or suspense as well as the scare of a good horror story.
Let's curl up in front of the fire (whether it be fireplace, stove, or candle) and let's start with the classics.
Classics
- Fall of the House of Usher & Other Tales by Edgar Allan Poe - The eerie tales of Edgar Allan Poe remain among the most brilliant and influential works in American literature. Some of the celebrated tales contained in this unique volume include: the world's finest two detective stories - "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter"; and three stories sure to make a reader's hair stand on end - "The Cask of Amontillado," "The Tell-Tale Heart," and "The Masque of the Red Death."
- The Lottery & Other Stories by Shirley Jackson - Eerie, unforgettable, and by turns terrifying and hilarious, Shirley Jackson's collection of 25 stories plunges us into a unique, brilliantly etched world where the uncanny lurks in the everyday and where nothing is quite what it seems. In "The Lottery," Jackson's most famous work and one of the greatest--and scariest--stories of the twentieth century, a small town gathers for an annual ritual that culminates in a terrible event. In "The Daemon Lover," a woman waits, then searches, for the man she is to marry that day, only to find that he has disappeared as completely as if he had never existed.
- The Uninvited by Dorothy MacArdle - When brother and sister, Roderick and Pamela Fitzgerald, move into an old house called Cliff End, located on the Devon coast, they find themselves with sleepless nights due to unexplainable odd disturbances. When Stella, a young neighbor & daughter of the former owner, visits the house, the horrible manifestations intensify. When Stella was a baby, her saintly mother died in a fall from the cliff. It is rumored that she had been pushed by a wild young Spanish girl who served as a model for Stella's artist father. When it becomes apparent that there are two spirits in the house, one warm and the other terrifyingly cold, battling over Stella, and the present is connected with the past, Roderick and Pamela must decide whether to abandon the house or investigate and find the truth behind the death of Stella's mother and, hopefully, behind the hauntings. This book was made into a movie with the same name in 1944, starring Ray Milland.
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