“At the foot of the stairs, the match went out, and he paused to strike another. And at the same moment, a knock, so quiet and stealthy as to be scarcely audible, sounded on the front door.”A life-long fan of tales of horror and the supernatural, Sarah Water’s novel The Little Stranger is a very modern ghost story in which war trauma, grief and cla…

In the run-up to our Ghosts issue, which will go up online on Halloween, the 31st, Litro Lab celebrates with a spooky podcast. We talk to actor Robert Lloyd Parry about bringing the tales of the ghost story master, M. R. James, to the stage in his one-man show, and listen to his reading of the author's "A School Story".The music used in this podcas…

Flash fiction—also known as short short fiction, sudden fiction, or "a smoke long" fiction—has been around since Aesop's Fables, but it's never been more popular, with magazines and websites now dedicated solely to it. It even has its own national day.In this Litro Lab episode, I talk to flash fiction writers David Gaffney (Sawn-off Tales, Salt, 20…

Today we kick off a new series on Litro Lab, where we invite a writer to choose a short story they love and talk to us about why they love it. Our first guest author is Alison Moore, whose debut novel The Lighthouse—which I recently reviewed for Litro—has been longlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize. Alison's pick is "Adventure" by Sherwood Anders…