Horror

Diabolical Dames: 13 Horror Story Collections by Women

A list of 13 horror story collections by women authors, like Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Tananarive Due, to get in your freezer immediately.

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Little known fact: In addition to being Black History Month, February is also host to Women in Horror Month. The initiative, which has been celebrated for the last eight years, aims to showcase the “underrepresented work of women in the horror industries.” In 2013, Tor Books wrote a post breaking down genre fiction submissions between male and female authors. In the horror genre, they recorded a frightful 17% from women and 83% from men. While this is only one publisher, it hints at a broader issue in publishing: women are submitting less and being published less – especially in certain genre fiction (such as horror). Now that you are sufficiently horrified, let’s celebrate Women in Horror Month by filling your TBR with horror story collections by women! “Read a collection of short stories by women” is one of the Book Riot Read Harder 2017 prompts, so we’ve put together a list of 13 short horror story collections by women for your spookish delight.
  1. The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson
  2. Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque by Joyce Carol Oates
  • American Gothic Tales by Joyce Carol Oates
  • Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link
  • Don’t Look Now: Selected Stories of Daphne du Maurier
  • The Yellow Wallpaper & Other Stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
  • The New Mother and Other Stories by Lucy Lane Clifford
  • Let’s Play White by Chesya Burke
  • Ghost Summer: Stories by Tananarive Due
  • The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter
  • Half in Shadow by Mary Elizabeth Counselman
  • The People in the Castle: Selected Strange Stories by Joan Aiken
  • This Strange Way of Dying: Stories of Magic, Desire, and the Fantastic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia