"All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered."

calendar girl

“The Professor’s Story of the Yellow Mask” is the sixth and final tale in Wilkie Collins’s first short-story collection, After Dark, published in 1856. It had first appeared in Charles Dickens’s magazine Household Words from 7 to 28 July 1855. Collins acknowledged the painter W.S....

“The Signal-Man” is a short ghost story by Charles Dickens, first published in December 1866 as part of the Christmas number of his magazine All the Year Round, within the collaborative railway-themed collection Mugby Junction. It is widely regarded as one of the finest Victorian...

Guy de Maupassant’s The Hand (La Main, 1883) is a short Gothic tale built around a Corsican vendetta. First published as La Main in Le Gaulois on December, 23rd 1883 (merry Christmas, I guess), it's a reworking of Maupassant’s earlier 1875 story La Main d’écorché...

“Twilight” is a short supernatural story by Marjorie Bowen, an author I often featured in these seasonal events, and it blends a ghostly atmosphere with a historical setting. It first appeared in Bowen’s 1913 collection God’s Playthings. Three women stood before a marble-margined pool in the...

The novel is a short maritime horror story by the French writer Georges-Gustave Toudouze (often listed in English as George G. Toudouze). It first appeared in French in 1927 under the title “La tour d’épouvante” (“The Tower of Terror”), and its first English publication was...