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Beyond Stephen King and Shirley Jackson: the best scary stories of recent years

From ghostly spaceships to zombies in a haunted shopping mall, author Daisy Johnson selects tales to give you goosebumps

It is that time of year again. The tree branches are beginning to show through, the ground is soggy with fallen red and orange leaves, the supermarket shelves are filled with pumpkins. With many of us working from home – or struggling to find work – and unable to see family or friends, small joys become large. This is the time of year to sit in the darkening evenings by a fire and read a book, preferably an unsettling or scary one. Luckily, we are spoilt for choice in this regard and many authors have been turning recently to the weird and the uncanny.

Short stories have always been a brilliant place to go to find horror and revel in the strange. The last 10 years have produced an abundance of collections worthy of visiting. Kelly Link’s astounding Get in Trouble has haunting tales about ghostly spaceships and warehouses filled with sleeping people. Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah explores the traumas of racism and consumerism, zombie characters haunting shopping malls on Black Friday, while Mariana Enriquez’s Things We Lost in the Fire (translated by Megan McDowell) examines political disruption using the supernatural.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3mAXxL6
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