I read a lot of short stories. I love the form, and find it especially conducive to my genre of choice: horror. Horror novels are great, but horror stories can provide that ice pick-stab of terror that often becomes diluted (or worse, wearying) over 300+ pages. And, of course, I’m trying to write this stuff, so short fiction is my classroom, my textbook.

Anyway, after devouring anthology after anthology, I’m starting to notice a few things.

Like many other writers have commented on in the past, there are only so many plots out there in the ether. That’s also true of the horror story. I started to wonder: how many basic horror plots are there? If you stripped away all the embellishment, the special effects, the bells and whistles, how many stories did you have?

I came up with thirteen. I’m sure there are a few more, or maybe a few could be combined, but I like my list. Here it is:

Types of horror stories

1. The horror is outside you. It is chasing you. It builds. You can’t (or won’t) stop it.
2. The horror is outside you. You try to stop it, but you make it worse.
3. The horror is outside you. You stop it, but it costs you.
4. You are chasing the horror. You don’t know it. It consumes you.
5. You are chasing the horror. You know it. It consumes you, or makes you complicit.
6. You are living the horror. You try to escape, but you can’t. Or maybe you do. Or maybe you only think you escaped.
7. You are the horror, or you create the horror. This includes revenge tales, if we put “horror” in air quotes.
8. The horror was inside you, but now it’s outside you. Can you contain it?
9. The whole world is horrible. How do you manage/survive? This encompasses all post-apocalyptic tales and dystopias.
10. Everything’s fine. Then the horror comes out of nowhere. It usually mows you down. Sometimes it takes a while, either for you to figure it out or to be destroyed.
11. Something bad/eerie/unexplained happened to me some time ago. Let me tell you about it.
12. The waking nightmare: nothing is making sense. The world has irrevocably changed. How do I navigate this without drowning? (could be seen as a subset of #6)
13. It’s all a big misunderstanding. I’m really fine…or am I?

I’ve taken to fitting every story I read into my list. So far, I’ve been pretty successful. It might be a reductionist exercise, but like outlining and keeping lists of story ideas, it makes writing manageable for me, and takes away a little of the terror of the blank page. If anyone has a category I missed, drop me a line.

Lagniappe: One of my favorite anthologies I’ve read in the last couple of years is Ellen Datlow’s Nightmares. Datlow’s premise is a good one: pick a favorite story from each year of the last decade, one story per writer only. Although I had read most of the writers she included before, many of the stories she chose were new to me, and a few (such as Livia Llewellyn’s “Omphalos”) were truly terrifying. Datlow is the premier anthologist of our generation, the Stephen King of the horror anthology, and Nightmares inspired my own list of the best horror of the last decade or so, following the same rules:

2003: Dan Chaon—The Bees
2004: Kelly Link—Stone Animals
2005: Joe Hill—Voluntary Committal
2006: Gene Wolfe—Sob In The Silence
2007: Lisa Tuttle—Closet Dreams
2008: John Langan—Lacoon, or, The Singularity
2009: Gerard Houarner—The Other Box
2010: M Rickert—Was She Wicked? Was She Good?
2011: Laird Barron—The Siphon
2011: Elizabeth Hand—Near Zennor
2012: Nathan Ballingrud—Wild Acre
2013:Paul Tremblay—Swim Wants To Know If It’s As Bad As Swim Thinks
2013: William Browning Spencer—The Indelible Dark
2014:Dale Bailey—The End of the End of Everything
2015:Brian Evenson—Seaside Town

It’s too early to pick a favorite for the last couple years, as I have too much to catch up on. Maybe in a few months.