#AScareADay Reading Challenge Reflections

I just spent the past month reading a scary story or poem for each day of October! This ambitious task was part of a reading challenge created by Dr. Sam Hirst, founder of Romancing the Gothic. I had such a great time last year participating in Sam’s inaugural #AGhostADay challenge, that I was thrilled when they announced they were doing a new challenge this October. While last year’s stories were mainly tales of revenants and hauntings, this year Sam broadened the focus to include as wide a variety of scary stories as possible. Subjects ranged from variations on classic vampires, werewolves, witches, and demons to more unique horrors like infectious fungi, primeval animals, and portals to other dimensions. You can see the full reading list of thirty-one stories for #AScareDay here. And check out the #AScareADay hashtag on (the platform formerly known as) Twitter or the #AScareADay feed on BlueSky to follow the discussion.

Participating in these daily reading challenges, while a bit exhausting, has been a great way for me to stay involved with the wonderful online community of Romancing the Gothic, despite no longer being able to make it to their weekly book club meetings over Zoom. It’s also a fantastic way to get exposed to new short stories and to revisit texts I otherwise might not have. Of the thirty-one stories for this year’s challenge, I’d previously read about a third of them, whether as part of my schooling or my Gothic self-education. A handful of the stories were also in the delightful Women’s Weird anthologies by Handheld Press, which I adore and reference frequently. Of the stories that were new to me, a few were by very familiar authors, such as Arthur Conan Doyle, J. Sheridan le Fanu, T. Kingfisher, and Stephen Graham Jones.

I enjoyed all of the stories included in this year’s challenge, but there are a few new discoveries that stand out to me as brand new favorites. One of the most memorable and surprising stories was “A Voice in the Night” by William Hope Hodgson. This 1909 tale is quite an early example of the mushroom horror trend that has taken the genre by storm lately. Another turn-of-the-century favorite was “The Ebony Frame” by Edith Nesbit (1891). I’ve read a few of Nesbit’s ghost stories before, mainly in the Women’s Weird collections, but this one is not quite a ghost story in the traditional sense. It is a tale of dreams vs. reality, destiny vs. choice, and it plays with some of my favorite Gothic tropes including the Faustian bargain and a character who bears an eerie resemblance to an old portrait. Of the more recently published stories, my favorite was by T. Kingfisher, an author whose horror and fantasy novels I’ve been doing a deep dive into this year. “Bluebeard’s Wife” is her clever twist on the Bluebeard folktale, a sort of reimagined alternate ending that explores a poignant combination of grief and guilt.

I also enjoyed reading new twists on an old favorite subject: vampires. At least half a dozen of the stories in this challenge featured some sort of vampire, including classic pieces of the cannon like Goethe’s “The Bride of Corinth” and Polidori’s “The Vampyre.” This was also probably my third time reading Robert Murray Gilchrist’s decadently weird story “The Crimson Weaver,” about a vampiric sorceress who weaves men’s lives into the clothing she wears. But three of the vampire tales were completely new to me. I was familiar with Mary Elizabeth Braddon through some of her ghost stories, but “Lady Ducayne” is a fairly subtle vampire tale published just before Bram Stoker’s Dracula landed on the scene. More science fiction than a work of fantasy, the story features an older gentlewoman who uses the new technology of blood transfusions to steal the youthful lifeblood of her hired companions in their sleep. Then there’s the tale by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, whom I was only vaguely familiar with as an early sexologist and gay rights activist but had no idea wrote fiction. His 1884 story “Manor” seems to be a sort of reimagining of John Stagg’s 1810 vampire poem that portrays the homosexual relationship at its center more overtly and in a rather positive light despite its tragic ending. Last was “The Night Cyclist” by Stephen Graham Jones, whom I know from his novels The Only Good Indians and My Heart Is a Chainsaw. In this short story, published on Tor.com in 2016, an immortal bicycle-loving blood-drinker steps into a conflict between cyclists and drivers in a mountainside town that quickly escalates into bloodshed.

Even if you missed the chance to participate in the reading challenge during October, I highly recommend going back to Sam’s list of #AScareADay stories the next time you’re looking for some short fiction to pick up. If you’ve read any of the stories on the list, let me know what you thought!