Goodreads asked R.E. Conary:

Can you tell us a two-sentence horror story?

R.E. Conary " The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door . . ."

This isn't mine, but I couldn't resist. It's from KNOCK by Fredric Brown, one of my all-time favorite authors. He started by saying, " There is a sweet little horror story that is only two sentences long:

"'The last man on Earth sat alone in a room There was a knock on the
door . . .'

"Two sentences and an ellipsis of three dots. The horror, of course,
isn't in the two sentences at all; it's in the ellipsis, the implication:
what knocked at the door? Faced with the unknown, the human mind supplies something vaguely horrible."

And that's how horror stories grab us -- when they work well -- sending chills up our spines and raising gooseflesh. Do we open the door or not?

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