By Horror Haunted by Celia Fremlin

This month Rebecca of Bookish Beck is hosting Short Story September. There are lots of short story collections I would like to read but I knew I would probably only have time for one this month, so I chose one that I would be almost guaranteed to enjoy. I loved Celia Fremlin’s 1970 short story collection Don’t Go to Sleep in the Dark, which I read a few years ago, and By Horror Haunted, originally published in 1974, sounded very similar. The title is slightly misleading, I think, as most of the stories can only very loosely be described as horror. Some are quite eerie and unsettling, one or two include ghosts, but most are concerned with the ‘horrors’ of everyday life. One story deals with a fear of flying, for example, and another features a man struggling to come to terms with blindness – both of which Fremlin describes convincingly and realistically. There are fifteen stories in the book and most are short enough to read in just a few minutes; although I would have liked some of…