Have the fright of your life

On the eve of Hallowe’en, Tim Martin scares himself witless with a survey of the year’s best horror stories

As killer clowns stalk the headlines and the technohorrors of Black Mirror and Westworld captivate audiences, some of the most chilling stories of the books season turn out to be hundreds – if not thousands – of years old. The brilliantly named

Penguin Book of the Undead

(Penguin Classics, £11.99), edited and mostly translated by the medieval historian Scott G Bruce, presents a surprisingly detailed and unpleasant collection of stories about evil spirits and the restless dead from antiquity to the Renaissance, complete with enough macabre hauntings, bloody confrontations and shambling corpses to match a shelf-ful of present-day horrors.

Bruce’s collection opens with Western culture’s oldest ghost story, the strange and ancient passage from Homer in which Odysseus digs a trench, fills it with “dark, clouding blood” and holds the twittering, thirsty ghosts of his friends and family at swordpoint until the prophet Tiresias arrives to tell his fortune. But it moves on fast through the Latin writers – there’s a hair-raising bit from Lucan about the necromancer Erictho, who fills a corpse’s chest with boiling blood and chopped-up bits of wild animals while muttering that “life in its true form will now be restored” – to the superstitions of medieval Europe and the north.

The Icelandic stories here are particularly upsetting: one dead warrior rises from his grave so hungry he can literally eat a horse, taking “great bites of horseflesh with his teeth, the blood streaming down from his mouth all the while he was eating”. Medieval English chronicles are scarcely less comforting. One pilgrim on his way to Canterbury finds a thing in the road that looks like “a small child rolling upon the ground in a sock”; it turns out to be a miscarried foetus, come to haunt him. The chronicler William of Newburgh reports on a jealous husband who climbs into the roofbeams to spy on his wife, then falls, dies, and rises again accompanied by a pack of howling dogs and a terrible miasma of plague. When some brave young men track his walking corpse to Earth, they find it “swollen to an enormous size, its face bloodied and bloated beyond measure” and emitting “a continuous stream of blood, as though it were swollen with the blood of many people, like a leech”. Another Buckinghamshire husband, returning from the dead to demand his conjugal rights and almost crushing his wife with “the immense weight of his body”, is only dispatched when a brave bishop posts a letter of absolution into his coffin. Stories like these record centuries of thinking, mostly Christian, about death, society and the human body, and their ghastly images retain a potent charge today. The season’s other horrors are of later date. It is common around this time of year for a classic ghost-story writer or two to rise again, in spanking new covers, and shamble from the dread gates of publishing. This year it’s the turn of EF Benson (1867-1940), a writer whose fame these days rests on the acidly camp Mapp and Lucia novels but who was admired by his contemporaries as a writer of horror stories as well.

( Vintage, £7.99) collects nine of his most gruesome performances, including a splendidly terse vampire story (“Mrs Amworth”) and the muchcollected “The Room in the Tower”, a peculiar tale in which the narrator’s years of recurring nightmares culminate in one horrible haunting. In stories such as “Negotium Perambulans”, in which a degenerate artist is pursued by a huge slug-like creature and its “orifice of puckered skin which opened and shut and slavered at the edges”, it’s easy to see why MR James accused Benson of “stepping over the line of legitimate horridness”; at times, these mannered, rather dated stories can still be impressively shocking.

Equally good is (Penguin Worlds, £8.99) by E Nesbit, who wrote fearsome stories for adults before her much better known children’s books ( The Railway Children, Five Children and It). Some of these will be familiar from other anthologies, particularly “Man-Size in Marble”,

Ghost Stories Horror Stories

about a pair of walking statues, and “John Charrington’s Wedding”, in which a husband promises ominously to make it to the altar come what may, but others are a delight to discover.

“The Violet Car” imagines a driverless vehicle roaming the highways to flatten pedestrians (and acquires an odd new flavour when read in the era of Google’s robotic smartcars and Tesla Autopilot), while stories such as “The Shadow” and “In the Dark” are economical genre lessons in charging innocuous events with horrible and threatening significance.

Two volumes from the British Library bring a touch of academic rigour to their selections from the history of horror.

edited by the Gothic scholar Andrew Smith, charts the fashion for Egyptological spookery from the building of the Suez Canal in the 1860s to the First World War. The centrepiece here is Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Lot No 249”, a long story in which an Oxford scholar rather suspiciously versed in the Eastern mysteries acquires a straggly bandaged minion to do his dirty work for him, but there are plenty of others too, around half of which have not been printed since their original publication.

Pyramid, Lost in a

Occasionally there’s a reason for that – we’re never far from a long-discarded racial stereotype or the stiff-upper-lip hokum of Empire – but it’s refreshing to see each story set in its historical and ideological context with Smith’s economical notes. Its sister volume,

is edited by Tanya Kirk, a British Library curator, and concentrates on book-related tales of the unexpected. A few of the usual suspects are present

Library, The Haunted

A degenerate artist is pursued by a vast slug with a slavering orifice

(MR James’s “The Tractate Middoth”, Edith Wharton’s “Afterward”) but others are more of a surprise: Denis Mackail’s “The Lost Tragedy” is a farcical ghost story in which the shades of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson arrive to relieve an auctioneer of a piece of amateur early work (“I’ve had enough trouble over Pericles and Titus Andronicus,” moans the ghostly Bard), while Margaret Irwin’s “The Book”, about a mildmannered stockbroker becoming