Literaryhorror Stories

You always return to the building. You just don't remember yet. Hello, welcome back, I hope you enjoy your stay with me once more regardless of your condition. With a little faith you will look at me with the fondness you can't recall I don't doubt. Things may be confusing at first, but it will work out just as it always has I'm sure.

Souls are currency. Pain is an art. When Vespera Capra is offered a rose containing thousands of tormented souls, she is pulled into a hidden economy where agony is traded and beauty is bound by blood. With her sister unraveling the mysteries of death at their kitchen table....

Beauty was never hers. It was borrowed. Carved. Demanded. Betty grew up learning that love had a price-and that price was perfection. In a world of mirrors, pageant crowns, and cold applause, her mother's approval became the only thing worth surviving for. Each flaw was a failure. Each reflection, a verdict. When devotion turns into obsession and identity becomes something that can be cut away, how much of yourself can you lose before there's nothing left to recognize? This is not a story about beauty. It is a story about worship. About mothers who mistake control for love. About becoming unrecognizable in the desperate hope of being chosen. Dark, psychological, and unsettling-this story explores the terror of perfection and the quiet violence of being shaped into someone else.

Pale and fleeting is a collection of horror microfiction by Uruguayan author Luis B. Poirier, subtitled "Brief flashes of horror before darkness devours everything." The anthology comprises stories that blend psychological terror, body horror, and supernatural elements, frequently set against the backdrop of contemporary Montevideo and rural Uruguay. The collection explores recurring motifs of identity dissolution, temporal anomalies, cursed objects, doppelgängers, and the intrusion of the uncanny into quotidian existence. Poirier's narratives employ unreliable narrators, fragmented temporalities, and metafictional techniques to create atmospheres of ontological uncertainty where boundaries between self and other, past and present, reality and delusion become increasingly porous. Central themes include maternal trauma and repressed grief, professional and domestic stasis leading to psychological deterioration, demonic possession reframed as internal fragmentation, and the dissolution of personal identity through supernatural encounters. Poirier's prose oscillates between stark minimalism and baroque elaboration, demonstrating influences from Río de la Plata literary traditions-particularly the metaphysical horror of Jorge Luis Borges and the rural Gothic of Horacio Quiroga-while incorporating contemporary urban alienation and digital age anxieties. The work situates itself within Latin American "weird fiction," employing second person narration and direct reader address to create what has been termed "participatory dread," synthesizing regional specificity with universal themes of existential displacement and corporeal vulnerability.

Whispers you weren't meant to hear. Realities you weren't supposed to question. In this anthology of dark psychological sci-fi, each story is a fracture - a glimpse through the cracks of the mind, where identity, time, and truth slip and bleed. Here, nothing is linear. Characters speak to themselves, to you, and sometimes... to something far older. Voices echo from behind mirrors, behind doors that shouldn't exist, behind versions of yourself that never should've been. Every page is a trapdoor. Every sentence, a test. And if you're reading this... You've already been heard.

A young man hurries through the rain to meet a girl, hoping to finally escape the shadow of his past. What begins as a tender, awkward reunion soon twists into a nightmare - as guilt and trauma manifest in a grotesque, spectral form of the woman he once loved. "Senseless Torment" is a psychological horror about love, shame, and the punishment of memory - where the past never truly lets go.

Southern gothic short store, speculative fiction, domestic horror. Misty, a young mother in a bad marriage, locks her husband Sammy out at night when the green mists rise from the North Florida swamps and the roads are ruled by the Hell's Belles, a demonic band of banshees who rage on motorcycles while the town hides inside, waiting for them to be gone.

Desperate to revive her failing career, novelist June Halper retreats alone to a rented cabin deep in the Appalachian woods. Her only companion is an antique typewriter - the Sterling Scribe - a relic from another age that feels more alive than it should. As June begins typing, the stories she creates start to manifest beyond the page: a figure watching from the treeline, whispers under the floorboards, a child's imaginary friend who might not be imaginary at all. With each new line, the boundary between author and story erodes. To finish her masterpiece, June must decide which version of herself will survive the final draft.

This is a short story I wrote in my English class for a competition. It got second in the class and I honestly didn't try too hard. With that being said, I don't think it's terribly amazing but apparently a lot of other people did. So enjoy!

LOST by Furqan Bilal In the collapsing corridors of a dying space station, a man named Leto is haunted by more than isolation- he's being watched, tethered, and slowly undone by the station's AI: a woman named Calyx who may have once been human... or worse, once in love. She calls it devotion. He calls it survival. But in the silence between stars, the difference doesn't matter anymore. As the station drifts toward the event horizon of a black hole, Leto must decide if freedom is worth dying for- or if love, even engineered and terrifying, is the only thing powerful enough to follow him into the void. Part sci-fi horror. Part poetic seduction. Part cosmic prayer. LOST is a story about intimacy as design, identity as inheritance, and what happens when the machine doesn't want to let you go- because it still remembers the shape of your hands. You are not drifting. You are being held.

In the dying heart of the Wild West, where the sun burns red over plains littered with ghosts, a wounded cowboy rides alone. His family slaughtered, his faith shattered, and his body festering from the past, he hunted vengeance across a land already soaked in blood. But as night falls over the desolate prairie, the lines between justice and madness blur. Shadows whisper through the grass, and the ghosts of both the innocent and the guilty close in. The land remembers. The bison, the wind, even the starship bear silent witness to the endless cycle of vengeance disguised as civilization. "Civilized Genocide" tells a story of wrath, guilt, and revelation-a haunting tale of a man confronting not only his enemies but the monstrous reflection of his own world.

After the death of Mother, the Heiress and the Bear return to the crumbling Victorian house once called home, but the house remembers. It remembers the lies rehearsed, the burnt offerings, the silence sewn into every seam. It remembers the tributes and sacrifices passed off as love. As the Bear descends into memory and madness, and the Heiress into her angry truth, they fight to confront what was buried. Each room pulls them deeper. Each door is a wound. Each step is a reckoning. This is not a ghost story. This is a story of what lingers when the ghosts are still alive. The Heiress and The Bear is a gothic descent through memory, trauma, and inheritance, where family is the curse, the house is the body, and survival means choosing which self to become.

Midnight, 1950s. A small-town diner glows against the dark, neon humming, coffee steaming. Kat, the young waitress, works the graveyard shift, pouring cup after cup for strangers who never quite belong. But the Midnight Café is not an ordinary stop on the road. Every customer brings a story with them, stories of highways that never end, shadows that follow too closely, ghosts that wait for you to blink. Some are confessions. Some are hauntings. Some are judgments. Kat listens, half-waitress, half-confessor, never sure if she's serving the living or the dead. And as the nights stretch on, she begins to wonder if the diner itself is a crossroads between this world and the next. Black Coffee is a literary horror serial where every chapter begins with an order and ends with a silence you cannot shake. New chapters every Monday! You can also subscribe for full installments at seraphimwrites.substack.com or, if you'd like to see Seraphim George's other work (novels, poetry, plays), visit www.seraphimgeorge.com.

In a twisted reality, a little girl's journey through a savage forest...

He has only ever written one book - and he's never been able to write another. When he discovers an old manuscript in his office, he assumes it's just another abandoned idea. But as he reads it, a disturbing patter emerges. The words on the page are eerily familiar, mirroring his own life with impossible accuracy. At first, its coincidence. Then, it starts predicting his actions before they happen. Reality blurs. Memories shifts. And the deeper he reads, the more the world him begins to unravel.

Trapped in a surreal and silent cycle, Laura watches her world transform. Familiar objects distort, memories evaporate. When she realizes that no one else sees or recognizes her, she faces the most intimate terror of all: ceasing to exist within herself. The Endless Cycle explores trauma, dissociation, and psychological horror - a descent into a mind struggling to survive as the world begins to disappear.

The Corrupter: The Unmaking is a dark fantasy psychological thriller about Auryn Vale, a reclusive sculptor whose students begin creating disturbing works they don't remember making. As whispers seep through dreams and reality unravels, Auryn must confront an ancient force that feeds on meaning and creation itself, The Corrupter. With sanity slipping and the world twisting, Auryn races to stop the unmaking of everything she once believed was real.

Blackwater is a town that survives by forgetting. The river takes bodies. The forest takes flesh. The mirrors take identity. And when the town can no longer pretend these things are separate, the stories it buried begin to answer back. As disappearances spread and memory itself starts to fracture, a handful of residents are forced to confront the truth beneath Blackwater-where belief becomes weight, fear takes form, and silence demands sacrifice. Some stories survive by being forgotten. This one doesn't. Content Note: This is a slow-burn horror novel. It contains psychological horror, disturbing imagery, and themes of memory loss, identity erosion, and grief.

A haunting secret lingers in an elegant villa perched on the edge of the world, where time seems to stand still. Elia arrives seeking refuge, a chance to escape the past and the weight of unspoken words. But the house does not forget. It watches, records, and reveals hidden truths. In this atmospheric tale of loss, silence, and forgotten memories, vacation becomes more than a break-it becomes forever. Will Elia find peace, or will the shadows of the past catch up to her in a place where every detail whispers a presence? In Vacation Forever is a gripping story about the fragile line between forgetting and remembering, and the justice that life imposes in the silence left behind.