Short Stories About Fear: 10 Classics Explained
Quick answer: Ten classic short stories about fear, from The Monkey's Paw and The Red Room to The Willows and The Most Dangerous Game, summarised and compared for readers and writers.
Fear is the emotion the short story does best, because fear lives in anticipation and the short story is all anticipation. These writers understood that the thing itself matters less than the knock, the draught, the second set of footprints.
The collection runs from the domestic (a paw on a mantelpiece, a room in a castle) out into the wild (a Danube island, a Canadian forest) and finishes with three men who are afraid of something they can name. Each title links to a page that summarises the story and explains its ending.
The stories
The Monkey's Paw by W. W. Jacobs. A retired sergeant brings a mummified paw to a quiet English household and warns against using it. Old Mr White wishes for two hundred pounds, and the next day a man in good clothes stands outside the gate, unable to come in.
The Red Room by H. G. Wells. A young sceptic spends the night in a supposedly haunted room of Lorraine Castle with seventeen candles lit against the dark. The candles go out one by one, faster than he can relight them.
Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad by M. R. James. A professor on a golfing holiday digs an old whistle out of a Templar ruin and blows it in his hotel room. That night the spare bed is not empty.
The Willows by Algernon Blackwood. Two friends canoeing down the Danube camp on a shrinking island covered in willows that seem to move closer each night. In the morning they find funnel-shaped holes in the sand, and one of their paddles is gone.
The Wendigo by Algernon Blackwood. A hunting party in the Canadian backwoods splits up, and the guide Defago is taken from his tent in the night by something that calls his name. His tracks change shape as they run.
The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe. A prisoner of the Inquisition wakes in total darkness in a cell whose dimensions he must map by touch, then finds himself strapped beneath a descending blade. The rats are his rescue.
The Horla by Guy de Maupassant. A Normandy landowner keeps a diary as an invisible presence drinks his water at night and reads over his shoulder. He stands before a mirror and cannot see himself.
The Boarded Window by Ambrose Bierce. A frontiersman prepares his dead wife's body for burial in a one-room cabin, alone, and falls asleep at the table. What wakes him is a sound from the corpse, and then a scream.
August Heat by W. F. Harvey. On the hottest day of the year an artist draws a stranger in a dock, then wanders into a stonemason's yard and finds the same man carving a gravestone. The name on the stone is the artist's, with today's date.
The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell. A big-game hunter falls off a yacht and swims to an island owned by a general who has grown bored of hunting animals. Rainsford is given a knife, three hours' start and a choice of the hounds.
Reading them together
The collection argues that fear is made by subtraction. Wells removes candles, Blackwood removes a paddle and then a man, Poe removes light and then space, Maupassant removes a reflection. Jacobs does it with a door that is never opened. Only Connell and Harvey put the threat in plain sight, and they compensate by fixing a time: three hours, and midnight.
The two Blackwood stories are the wild half of the theme, and they share a trick: the natural world is not hostile, it is indifferent, and the characters' fear comes from realising they are the only ones counting.
If you want to write about fear
What writers can take from this
- Read The Monkey's Paw and The Boarded Window first; each is short and each ends at the exact moment a lesser writer would have continued.
- The Red Room and The Horla are both about scepticism failing; read them together to compare the English and French versions.
- Blackwood's stories are long; read The Willows in daylight, outdoors if you can, and see whether that helps.
- In The Most Dangerous Game, mark each of Rainsford's traps and what it costs Zaroff.
- August Heat is barely two thousand words and its last line is a masterclass in stopping.
Try it yourself
Write a story in which a character spends the night in a single room, and the only thing that changes over the course of the night is the number of something they can count.
Questions
What is the best short story about fear?
The Monkey's Paw is the most anthologised, and The Willows the one writers of the uncanny most often name. The Most Dangerous Game is the standard for suspense.
Which short stories about fear are good for students?
The Monkey's Paw, The Red Room, The Most Dangerous Game and August Heat are short, clear and built around visible countdowns. The Pit and the Pendulum is the usual Poe choice for this theme.
Which classic story about fear is the shortest?
The Boarded Window is under two thousand words, and August Heat is about the same. The Red Room is a little longer.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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