Matt Shaw Short Stories/Novellas books in order

Reading order

Matt Shaw has been writing short horror fiction since 2007, and the 66 entries in this listing cover nearly two decades of output. His earliest works, The Obvious Child (2007) and Love Life (2009), predate his extreme horror period and show a writer still finding his voice. By 2012, with Smile, Buried, and The 8th, the shape of his later work was becoming clear: short, direct, and aimed at maximum impact over minimum page count.

The 2015 and 2016 entries represent a particularly heavy stretch of production. Titles like Evil Little Things (2015), Paralysed (2015), The Lonely Psychopath (2016), and Twisted Bitches (2016) arrived in rapid succession and established Shaw’s reputation in the extreme horror community as a writer who could sustain shocking content with genuine storytelling craft. The novellas from 2017 through 2019, including Box, Postal, Chained, and Eve, tend to have slightly more developed premises and benefit from the extra space to build atmosphere before the horror arrives.

The more recent short works from 2021 onwards are a mixed bag in the best sense. The Suicide Club (2021), Her Name was Amber (2022), and The Things He Heard (2022) lean toward psychological horror, while titles like The Hungry Clit-erpillar (2023) and Spaghetti (2023) are firmly in the transgressive comedy lane. Between The Jaws of Death (2025) and Life, Death and the In-between (2025) suggest Shaw is still as restless and productive as ever.