My favorite time of year has come and gone. I’ve always loved October as the time of year when spooky sensibilities are celebrated and opportunities to dress up in costume abound. But for the past few years, this month has had the added benefit of combining my affinity for the dark and macabre with my love of reading through Romancing the Gothic’s #AScareADay reading challenge. Each year since 2022, Dr. Sam Hirst curates a reading list of Gothic, horror, supernatural and weird fiction to read throughout the month. These thirty-one short stories are arranged in chronological order and assigned to each day of October. Participants are encouraged to discuss the tales on social media using the hashtag #AScareADay. You can find my daily thoughts over on BlueSky and view the full reading list for this year’s challenge here. You can also check out my previous blog posts on the #AScareADay challenge for 2025, 2024, and 2023. Each year, Sam provides us with a new set of stories, and I’ve discovered some of my favorite writers through this challenge!
Sam always does a particularly good job of drawing from the deep well of spooky literature rather than just picking obvious and familiar stories. There was only one on this list that I remembered having already read—and actually I covered it a decade ago in my post on “Ghost Stories to Get You in the ‘Spirit’ for Halloween,” so I guess it’s been a while. It’s “The Cold Embrace” by Mary Elizabeth Braddon and it is still an absolute classic! I also, while working on this blog post, realized that I have previously read “The Prayer” by Violet Hunt and mentioned it in my post on “Women and the Golden Age of Ghost Stories.” It hit me like I was reading it for the first time, though, and I still think this story of a wish gone wrong is one of the spookiest in this year’s list. There were a few other authors on the list I was already familiar with. I’ve dabbled in reading some Arthur Machen (who is best known for being a major influence on H. P. Lovecraft) but hadn’t read “The White Powder” before. His dense and esoteric style can be pretty hit or miss for me and this might have been my least favorite story of the month—but only because the others were so good! We also read “The Well” by W. W. Jacobs who I previously only knew from his icon story “The Monkey’s Paw.” And as we got to the more modern stories, I was delighted to come across one by Darcie Little Badger I hadn’t read before. I wrote about Darcie’s quite scary story “The Famine King” in my post several years ago about “Spooky Stories to Consume Like Candy,” but the story in this year’s challenge, “Those Hitch-hiking Kids,” is a surprisingly sweet tale of young ghosts in love.
My favorite story we read this year was another tale of love after death: “Since I Died” by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. Though just as touching as Darcie Little Badger’s tale, this one is much more melancholy, since only one member of the couple has passed away while the other one lives on, deaf to the pleadings of the lingering spirit to notice her. The prose in this story is gorgeous and the way it describes moving through space and time is a particularly interesting depiction of the spirit world. I also really loved “The Past” by Ellen Glasgow, which was one of several stories in this month’s list to tackle the classic First Wife trope. While “Secret Chambers” by Mrs Wilson Woodrow has echoes of Du Maurier’s Rebecca and Poe’s “Ligeia” and “From the Loom of the Dead” by Elia Peattie puts a positive spin on the trope by having the ghostly first wife haunt the neglectful stepmother into proper parenting, Glasgow’s story takes a new approach to the trope by telling the story through an impartial third-party narrator who helps to break the haunting. When the unnamed narrator takes the role of secretary to the second Mrs. Vanderbridge, she quickly realizes that the ghost of the first wife is haunting their home, causing Mr. Vanderbridge to dwell in the past and slowly draining the life from her successor with her hateful glares. Different characters in the story muse on theories of the afterlife and whether the resentful spirit of the first wife is an exaggeration of her real traits or something being projected onto her by the guilt-ridden husband. Ultimately, though the secretary helps uncover some damning secrets of the first wife, it is more her emotional support of the second wife that allows her to confront the ghost head-on instead of continuing to live in fear. Of the more modern stories, my favorite was the very last one, which was published in Nightmare Magazine earlier this year: “The Dark Follows Me” by Quincy Lee is about a professional co-navigator and their DeafBlind client who find their roles reversed when the narrator revisits the home that tormented them as a child.
Though October and the reading challenge are now over, it’s never too late to pick up these stories. You can find links to read them all online for free on the Romancing the Gothic website. And you can always click through the links at the top of the page for the reading lists from previous years to discover even more excellent stories. If this reading challenge sounds like something you’d like to participate in, give @romgothsam.bsky.social a follow on BlueSky and mark your calendar to keep an eye out for the reading list next October. Whether you read along last month or have checked out the stories since, let me know in the comments which ones were your favorites!