Get your scares on without spending a dime… or leaving your chair.
Here are links to many public domain horror stories available online, and you can read them at your computer, or download them to a mobile device. For
.
Project Gutenberg is a library of 17,000 free ebooks whose copyrights have expired. There’s a searchable database of .txt and html files, and no signup or login required. You aren’t going to find any contemporary horror novels (don’t expect to find a Stephen King, for example) but many of the classics are there.
Here’s a sampling of my favorites…
The Raven and THE WORKS OF EDGAR ALLAN POE, Volume 2, which includes The Black Cat, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Masque of the Red Death, The Cask of Amontillado, The Pit and the Pendulum, and The Tell-Tale Heart, among others.
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving
FRANKENSTEIN by Mary Shelley
DRACULA by Bram Stoker
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
FAMOUS MODERN GHOST STORIES by various authors (including A. Blackwood, E. A. Poe, A. Bierce, G. de Maupassant)
The Wendigo and FOUR WEIRD TALES by Algernon Blackwood
The Vampyre by John Polidori
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
And another huge archive of classic horror stories here (including H.P. Lovecraft, who I couldn’t find at Gutenberg).
Check out my next post (at 4pm CDT) for information on horror movies you can see on your computer for free. That’s right. FREE.
Comment to either post and you’ll get a chance to win a signed copy from my backlist.
Signed,
Meljean Brook
Your Horror Dealer
OMG! I beyond gitty over this! Thanks a bunch Meljean *G*
Bad news? Meljean just HAD to add another layer to my TBR
listscroll.Good News? They’re FREE! And not free as in not-worth-paying-for, but free as in PRICELESS!
Sweet! I’ll have to check out Frankenstein. Haven’t read that in a long time
mwahaha! Edgar Allen Poe is so classic and so freaky. It wasn’t often that the stuff we had to read in Lit class felt so fresh and (dare-I-say-it) modern. I still remember feeling chills up my spine as I read the Pit and the Pendulum and the Tell-Tale Heart. *shiver*
Will have to get my hands on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Never did read it.
Is it just me or did we forget to put the contest in this?
I love the legend of Sleepy Hollow! especially the movie – Depp is just too funny in it! 🙂
I fixed.
I remember reading Poe’s “The tell-tale heart” and “Cask of Amontillado” and also Henry James’s “The turn of the screw”. All three are truly scary stories not because they deal with supernatural elements,but bc the protagonists are simple people who,for this reason or the other,just cross the line of sanity.Not to mention that these stories are told in such a simple, flowing proze that the result leaves you breathless.
Cool, thanks gwen! I think I have managed to leave the contest off every post so far. Go team me!
Read The Raven and Legend of Sleepy Hollow for English lit in school. Sure would have been easier having these online like now when we had to do our reports – much easier than searching for Cliff notes if we were too busy working and then partying after school to read them in time, lol.