Short Story Wednesday: Two Books of Horror and Strange Stories

  

Today I am sharing two of my husband's short story books, which lean toward the strange and the weird. Normally these are not the sort of stories I prefer, but I think I will be trying some stories from both of these in the future.

Nightmare Flower 
Stories by Elizabeth Engstrom
Introduction by Lisa Kröger

Description from the back of the book:

This collection of eighteen short tales, a novelette and a short novel takes the reader inside the dark imagination of Elizabeth Engstrom, author of acclaimed horror classics like When Darkness Loves Us. 

In these stories, you will read about a woman asked to be complicit in her own mother’s death, a grandmother with a macabre hobby, a bizarre, phallic-shaped flower that portends evil for a married couple, a father whose son is caught up in a sinister government experiment. These are weird and unsettling tales that will linger with the reader.

​In her introduction to this new edition, Lisa Kröger writes, “There are true horrors that await readers in all of Engstrom’s works ... reminds me of another giant of horror literature, Shirley Jackson.”

Elizabeth Engstrom is an American author of speculative fiction, who grew up in Illinois and Utah. This book was originally published in 1992 by Tor. Many of the stories in it were published between 1986 and 1991; others were published for the first time in the 1992 Tor edition. 

Scotland the Strange: Weird Tales from Storied Lands
Edited by Johnny Mains

Description from the back of the book:

From misty moors, crags and clifftops comes a hoard of eighteen strange tales gathered by Johnny Mains, award-winning anthologist and editor of the British Library anthology Celtic Weird. Sourced from Scotland’s storied literary heritage and bustling with witches, ghosts, devils and merfolk, this selection celebrates the works of treasured Scottish writers such as John Buchan, Robert Louis Stevenson, Dorothy K. Haynes and Neil M. Gunn alongside rare pieces by lesser-known authors – including two tales translated from Scots Gaelic.

Brooding in the borderlands where strange folklore, bizarre mythology and twentieth-century hauntings meet, this volume promises chills and shivers as keen and fresh as the wind-whipped wilds of Scotland.

The stories in Scotland the Strange were published between 1818 and 1976. Each story is preceded by one or more paragraphs about the author. 

Here is a list of the stories and authors in Scotland the Strange:

• The Hunt of Eildon / James Hogg
• The Murder Hole / Catherine Sinclair
• The Doom of Soulis & The Seven Lights / John Mackay Wilson
• The Devil of Glenluce / Eliza Lynn Linton
• The Cavern of Steenfoll: A Scottish Legend / Wilhelm Hauff, translated by S. Mendel
• Ticonderoga / Robert Louis Stevenson
• "Death to the Head That Wears No Hair!" / David Grant
• The Ghosts of Craig-Aulnaic /Anonymous
• The Stag-Haunted Stream / Mrs. Campbell of Dunstaffnage
• The Two Sisters and the Curse / Translated by Rev. John Gregorson Campbell
• The Outgoing of the Tide / John Buchan
• Assipattle and the Mester Stoorworm / Elizabeth W. Grierson
• Black-Haired John of Lewis, Sailor / Translated by Rev. James MacDougall
• The Moor / Neil M. Gunn
• Good Bairns / Dorothy K. Haynes
• The Lass with the Delicate Air / Eileen Bigland
• The Inheritance / Simon Pilkington
• The Curse of Mathair Nan Uisgeachan / Angus Wolfe Murray