Spooky Stories Trivia Quiz

Answer: Danse Macabre

Before there were novels every year for time immemorial, Stephen King tried his hand at short fiction while working a series of odd jobs (including teaching English). Many of his short stories and novellas subsequently appeared in published collections like "Night Shift" (1978), "Skeleton Crew" (1985), "Nightmares & Dreamscapes" (1993), "Everything's Eventual" (2002), "Just After Sunset" (2008), and "The Bazaar of Bad Dreams" (2015), and many of those have gone on to be adapted into major feature films. "Danse Macabre" is the odd one out, being one of King's few forays into non-fiction.

Answer: The Hellbound Heart

Published in 1986, "The Hellbound Heart" was the basis for what may be one of Clive Barker's most enduring adaptations-- "Hellraiser". Centred around a mystical puzzle box, the story follows Hellish creatures known as Cenobites and the people who summon them into our world. Ultimately, Barker focused on novels coming out of the 1990s but most of his shorter works (and some of his more avant-garde) went into the six volumes of "The Books of Blood". Stories like "The Forbidden" (which would become "Candyman"), "Dread", and "Midnight Meat Train" would become horror films in their own right.

Answer: Penpal

Created by Dathan Auerbach (known as 1000Vultures online), "Penpal" tracked a handful of stories, all from the same narrator, as he recounted the odd events in his life that, only when it was too late, all seemed to be connected. "Penpal" found popularity in self-publishing in the early 2010s, but it continued to take advantage of the shorter story format in audio-- it was featured in parts on "The NoSleep Podcast" in 2011. Auerbach handled the novel format in 2018 with "Bad Man".

Answer: The Lottery

Set in a small American town, "The Lottery" followed-- get this-- a lottery. The catch was that the end of the story revealed that the winner of said lottery didn't win a prize, but a punishment. The shocking twist of this short story was enough to convince readers to cancel their "New Yorker" subscriptions; the story was banned altogether in South Africa. Nonetheless, the story has been subject to critique for decades and continues to influence media to this day. Jackson would go on to be one of the most famous authors in contemporary American horror fiction, also writing "The Haunting of Hill House" and "We Have Always Lived in the Castle".

Answer: The Turn of the Screw

Released over four months at the start of 1898, "The Turn of the Screw" quickly became an iconic ghost story and the basis for films, TV, theatrical performances, and radio adaptations. Set in a British manor house, it follows a protective governess as she sorts through the building's haunting while trying to take care of the children living there. Written as a ghost story, it was later interpreted via all manner of psychoanalytic and sociological approaches; some readers may question whether or not the haunting was ever real to begin.

Answer: The Bloody Chamber

Published in 1979, "The Bloody Chamber" contained ten short stories, all of which rooted themselves in classic fairy tales, but with a more adult twist. What resulted from this experiment was a series of stories with remarkably feminist takes; the collection became a popular text to study for literary critics due to its subversions and uses of Gothic tradition.

The stories were graphic, lush in detail, and relentless as they extrapolated on "Bluebeard", "Little Red Riding Hood", "Beauty and the Beast", and others known the world over.

Answer: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" is a short tale originally written by American author Washington Irving-- you may know it for the Headless Horseman.

The rest, however, are Poe stories representing a small handful of his large catalogue of American Gothic tales. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" is a bit of a double whammy since it was also one of the earlier works in the mystery genre. All three of the Poe stories here have a slight supernatural bent, though "Rue Morgue" might be a little more grounded than the others (despite a surprising twist at the end).

Answer: The Colour Out of Space

Set in Arkham, Massachusetts, "The Colour Out of Space" involves a meteor which landed nearby many years earlier and has since blighted the surrounding area, creating awful monstrosities and affecting the minds of locals. It's par for the course for Lovecraft, whose ability to describe the ineffable across works like "The Call of Cthulhu", "At the Mountains of Madness", and "The Dreams in the Witch House" shaped horror forever, being an influence on Stephen King and Brian Lumley amongst other writers, and Guillermo Del Toro and Panos Cosmatos amongst filmmakers.

"The Willows" was written by Algernon Blackwood, "The Monkey's Paw" was by W. W. Jacobs, and "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" was by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Answer: Her Body and Other Parties

Winner of the Shirley Jackson Award for Short Fiction in 2017, "Her Body and Other Parties" contained a number of short stories expectedly about the female body (or bodies) in some ways. "Especially Heinous" is particularly unusual because it's presented as a list of episodes of "Law & Order SVU", completely reimagining the crime program as a surreal and grotesque alternate tale.

While some of the stories for this collection were published in publications like "Strange Horizons" and "Granta", others were original, created for Machado's first published book. "Especially Heinous" was originally published as a novella in 2013.

Answer: Last Days

Nevill writes with a healthy balance between full novels and short fiction and commenced publication of his short story collections in 2016. "Some Will Not Sleep", "Cries from the Crypt", "Before You Sleep", and "Hasty for the Dark" were all released in the span of a year and a half, filling in Nevill's back catalogue to match up to his novel output. "Wyrd and Other Derelictions" was a unique instance. Released in 2020, it featured a series of short tales, very few of which featured any humans whatsoever but showed clear signs of something that may have happened a short time before.

"Last Days" was one of his novels; it was released in 2012.