The Shadow Behind You

20 Horror Short Stories of Stalked in the Dark

By: Adrian Cave

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

The Shadow Behind You is a collection of twenty psychological horror stories about the thing you almost noticed. Not the monster that announces itself, not the shock that resolves into explanation — but the quieter, stranger presence that installs itself in the margins of an ordinary life and stays there. The footsteps that match your pace exactly and vanish when you turn around. The reflection that moves a half-second after you do. The wardrobe that breathes in the dark while you sleep three feet away. The voice that says your name from whichever room you happen to have your back to.
Each story follows a different person — a night jogger, a radio host, a librarian, a commuter, a photographer, a taxi driver, a hiker alone on a winter trail — as they notice the thing at the edge of their awareness, document it, investigate it, and learn to live alongside it. Because no one in these pages is destroyed. Every one of them is still in their life, still in their job, still walking home along the same streets. They simply know something now that they didn't know before.
Written in the tradition of literary horror — slow-burn, atmospheric, and deeply unsettling — The Shadow Behind You is less interested in the scream than in the silence just before it. Less interested in what the darkness contains than in the moment you become certain it contains something. These are stories about ordinary people in ordinary lives who paid the wrong kind of attention at the wrong moment, and found that once you notice the shadow, the shadow notices you back.
Read it at night. Sit with it after. Notice whether the room feels the same.