The best spooky stories for Christmas, from Victorian classics to contemporary creepy tales | Books

This is a time for ghost stories. There’s a reason Shakespeare tells us: “A sad tale’s best for winter: I have one of sprites and goblins.” And why Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and its (superior?) muppets version have retained popularity.

Since pagan times, people have believed in the supernatural potential of the winter solstice. It’s a liminal moment, when the darkness retreats and the light returns, a hinge point where the door between the living and the dead can swing open. (Other liminal moments are considered supernaturally powerful, too. Midnight, for instance. And its opposite – The Apparition of Mrs Veal, sometimes described as the first modern ghost story, has its spirit appear at noon.)

So, as we approach the end of one year and the start of another, do enjoy some spooky stories. The list below features some suggestions beyond the Victorian classics, to give you a nice, contemporary creep.

And when you’re done, do make time for those muppets.

They Flee from Me That Sometime Did Me Seek by Sarah Perry

You might be surprised to hear that English Heritage is responsible for one of the most unsettling short stories of our times. And yet Eight Ghosts – an anthology of tales inspired by their historic locations – contains exactly this, from Booker-longlisted author Sarah Perry.

Set at Audley End house and gardens in Perry’s beloved Essex, the tale tells how a young conservator is charged with restoring a Jacobean screen, rumoured to be cursed. So far, so familiar. However, the nature of the curse is what makes this story so frightening. Because while we readers are prepared for the supernatural to mete out madness or even death, Perry has come up with a fate for her characters that is even worse. I still think about it when I’m lying awake, in the dark.

Adela’s House by Mariana Enríquez

Fans often talk about the power of horror to expose real-world darkness – and few wield this power as well as Mariana Enríquez. Her writing draws on the gothic tradition to examine the upheavals of Argentina’s contemporary history, balancing supernatural scares with the very human horrors of poverty, corruption and violence.

In Adela’s House – from the collection Things We Lost in the Fire – three children in Buenos Aires become fascinated by an abandoned house, said by local people to be nothing more than a shell. But when the children dare to go inside, they find that it’s far from empty. The chilling events of Adela’s House are echoed in Enriquez’s novel Our Share of Night, which is also worth your time.

Churail by Kamila Shamsie

Shamsie’s narrator has always known that her father brought her from Pakistan to England after her mother died in childbirth. But there’s a rumour that they fled because her mother became a churail: a ghost, with a beautiful face and backwards feet, who lives in a tree and sucks the life from helpless men. Might it be true? And how far can a churail reach?

Shortlisted for the BBC national short story award in 2023, and covering themes of feminism, climate crisis and assimilation, Churail warns us: you can run from the past, from hardship and from responsibilities. But these things will haunt you.

The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle

OK, this is more of a weird story rather than a ghostly one. But it shows so brilliantly how supernatural fiction builds on its history to express contemporary concerns. This reworking of HP Lovecraft’s The Horror at Red Hook is by Victor LaValle: a black author who enjoyed Lovecraft stories as a child and only later recognised the racism within them. His novella follows Charles Thomas “Tommy” Tester as he navigates an occult-tinged, jazz age Harlem – and is transformed into an entity with terrible powers.

Dedicating the story to Lovecraft “with all my conflicted feelings”, LaValle asks: how are monsters made? Who deserves our sympathy? And is cosmic horror any worse than commonplace human hatred?

All Souls’ by Edith Wharton

Go on then, just one classic, from Edith Wharton: All Souls’, a story written mere months before the author’s death and infused with all the anxieties of growing old.

On the last morning of October, a rich widow breaks her ankle while out walking (shortly after meeting a mysterious stranger, as it happens) and must spend several days in bed. Her situation worsens when she wakes the next morning to find her house abandoned: the fires unlit, her servants gone. Through long stretches of the story, absolutely nothing happens. And it’s utterly terrifying – a suggestion that the loneliness associated with age and infirmity is as dreadful as any evil spirit.