May 28, 2025, 9:30am
According to the powers that be (er, apparently according to Dan Wickett of the Emerging Writers Network), May is Short Story Month. To celebrate, for the third year in a row, the Literary Hub staff will be recommending a single short story, free* to read online, every (work) day of the month. Why not read along with us? Today, we recommend:
James Tadd Adcox, “A Haunting”
ergot. is consistently publishing strange and ambitious horror (or horror-adjacent) work, often quite short, often very compelling reading. I don’t always love reading web-only stuff but the simplicity of ergot. and the sense that any given day, there could be something new and startling on the homepage, makes it a reliable read for me. This particular story is just one that I’ve loved in the last few months—about a strange video (always a plus) and that uncanny thing that happens when a piece of media somehow slides out of your head but also manages to stick around. Unease, dread, and a bit of wonder.
The story begins:
Late in his life, long after he’d stopped being afraid of monsters in the dark, he found himself haunted by a certain movie. It was a cheaply made movie from several decades earlier, produced around the time he had been a child and released straight to video, featuring bland actors and effects which were intended to be horrifying but came across instead as ludicrous, and which he had watched on the recommendation of a friend online who loved such films.
*If you hit a paywall, we recommend trying with a different/private/incognito browser (but listen, you didn’t hear it from us).