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Discover weekly, the best short stories

Looking for a steady supply of thriller short stories? Every week thousands of writers submit stories to our writing contest.

150+ Thriller Short Stories to read

Submitted by writers on Reedsy Prompts to our weekly writing contest. Looking for a story that will keep you on the edge of your seat and holding your breath? Don’t skip our collection of thriller short stories.

Thriller Short Stories – Page 3 of 10

How to Bury Tommy Perez (a tutorial by Sailor Wizel)

Emma Parker

Weekly Contest #352

TW: A little bit of gore and mentions of blood It was incredibly dark out the morning Sailor buried the boy.A certain panic can rise through your body when something like this happens, but Sailor was surprisingly cool for someone who had just killed someone. It might’ve had to do with the anger management classes she had been in. Every time she dug the shovel into the dewy grass, she took a deep breath and breathed out slow and controlled, just as Ms. Pierce had instructed her. In short, no panic or urgency was inflicted on Sailor and she go...

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Margin of Error

Brenda Vazquez Aldana

Weekly Contest #351

The message was only twelve words long. Kovács read it twice before sending, thumb hovering over the encrypted transmit key. He had spent twenty years of his career learning how to say exactly enough—and never more. Too much detail could expose an operation. Too little could ruin one. This message walked that line. TARGET CONFIRMED. PROCEED WITH CLEAN SWEEP AT FIRST LIGHT. NO SURVIVORS. It was meant for a small, trusted team stationed across the border. They were waiting for his confirmation to move on a weapons cache hidden in an abandoned ...

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LifeTime Inc.

Weekly Contest #351

Mason Fleece’s eyes opened to silence for the first time in years. Screetches from his alarm clock had pulled him from dreams of rainforests and mountains every morning for the last decade. Even on weekends. Especially weekends. Today was different, his first day of retirement. He looked to his bedside, 5:48AM. He chuckled to himself, he’d slept an extra three minutes. No need for an alarm buzzer I guess, he thought. Standing sleekly behind his alarm clock was his LifeTime clock. It was in stark contrast to his outdated one. He picked it up ...

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Fear Manifested.

Jesse Hansen

Weekly Contest #351

When Justin and I were in our twenties, going to an adult-only roller rink at 10:30 PM would hardly have sounded like a wild night out. But tonight, that was exactly what we were doing, and it was the most adventurous thing we’d done together in quite a while. “Can you believe we’re actually out at night together?” I asked, with what I hoped was the perfect amount of enthusiasm. “Crazy,” he said, without looking up from his phone. “You know, we left a bit early. Do you want to stop and grab dessert on the way? How about ice cream? A big one ...

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The Color Black

Zoe Alatsas

Weekly Contest #351

I wake to the sound of church bells. They fill the air with their chimes and dings, signaling the eighth hour of the day. There are voices outside, shouting something in a language I do not understand. The room is dark and cold. I open my eyes and look down. My bare legs are covered by a thin blanket, if you could even call it that. The fabric practically falls apart when I touch it. It smells like rain and dirt. I try and search the room for something to cover myself with. The cold wraps itself around me. Goosebumps appear up and down my ar...

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Exactly the Way it Does

Matt Zimmer

Weekly Contest #351

Our high school talent show was in two weeks—we couldn’t agree.Brian, our bassist, said, “Let’s cover Primus,” then started slapping and popping—pretending to be Les Claypool.It sounded terrible. I plugged my ears with my fingers while Joel, our drummer, leaned into his mic.“No way, dude—you suck!” he said. “And not like Primus sucks.”Everyone laughed except Brian. He turned up his amp and kept playing.Of course Eddie on keys wanted to do Teenage Wasteland—anything by The Who. Then my little sister Sue, our unofficial groupie, said, “Why don...

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Ink that bites back

Latasha Hall

Weekly Contest #351

The first time it happened, Mara thought it was a coincidence.She had been sitting at her kitchen table, the cheap notebook open, pen tapping nervously against the page. Writing had always been her escape—control on paper when life refused to cooperate.“I need something good to happen,” she muttered, then wrote:Tomorrow, I will receive unexpected money.It felt harmless. Wishful.The next day, her phone rang at 6:13 a.m.Her brother’s voice cracked on the other end. “Mara… Mom didn’t make it.”The world tilted.Three days later, a check arrived. ...

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Gone

Daniel R. Mangru

Weekly Contest #351

He looked at the withered post-it note affixed to the center of a refrigerator door. Written on it were two scribbled words, “Anterograde amnesia,” and one name with a single question. “Herb, who am I?” he read aloud. His voice echoed from each empty wall until it dissipated into an empty corner. A small obelisk sitting as the centerpiece on the dining table, the size of a pocket-sized book, came to life with rings of light illuminating their way to the top. Once they reached the tip, a voice that sounded familiar, yet was clearly not at th...

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The Writer Who Wasn’t Alone

Jim Moore

Weekly Contest #351

I wasn’t supposed to be in the story.That’s rule number one.You create the world. You shape the characters. You decide what they feel, what they lose, what they fight for.You don’t step inside it.But this contest prompt got under my skin.Write a story from the POV of the creator…“Alright,” I muttered, cracking my knuckles. “Let’s have some fun.”I opened a blank document.And stared.Nothing.No spark. No flow. No clever opening line. Just that same empty wall I’d been hitting for weeks.“Come on…” I whispered. “Give me something.”The cursor blin...

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Psychopomp and Circumstance

Steven Bari

Weekly Contest #351

Ten thousand years of memory could not prepare the vicar for what he was about to see: The stone doors of the mighty ziggurat were open. Eons ago, he had given up his flesh and soul to the ancient deity buried deep inside, to remain as a ghoul floating in the physical world. His only material connection was the blood-red robes covering his ghastly, ethereal form. No one had even seen the doors ajar, let alone wide open. The primordial god slept down in the depths, below the structure's foundation, beneath the sands, beyond the stretch of the...

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Out of Options

Weekly Contest #350

“We’ll be in touch.”John let out a dry breath. They wouldn’t. He rested his forehead on the steering wheel and sat there to collect his thoughts. His mind replayed the interview in fragments. The dread forced smile, the way the interviewer’s eyes drifted past him, the subtle shift in tone when he talked about being laid off because his factory shut down. It was not his fault. Almost every factory shut down, and all the jobs went to South American countries. Factory work didn’t translate well in rooms like that. Neither did desperation. He ha...

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It's all Over.

Weekly Contest #350

The first one Martin Kempt noticed was the one in the middle. The one with the straw-dry salt and pepper hair, crinkled back behind his ears - part of a panel of three who would be interviewing Mr. Kempt – who had his attention directed downward to a small stack of papers which he shuffled with such deliberation as to look affected. Martin, already laminated in perspiration under the strain of the impending interview, now gushed. His clothes became thick and soggy and moved strangely against his skin, and -- dare he believe it -- already exp...

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The Accidental Robber

Matthew Deng

Weekly Contest #350

There were a pair of police officers checking security over a local bank. The bank had just been robbed about five minutes prior and the two officers were tasked with checking security on the left side of the bank where they had seen the team of bank robbers leave from that area. They were about to report it to their commanders when they saw a random man by the name of John Tenwrit walk by and saw a dropped bag of stolen cash. “Should we report this,” asked one of the officers to his partner. His partner replied by saying that...

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Author

Owen Sintch

Weekly Contest #351

David had never written anything good in his life. Not in his school essays, not in his postcards, not even in his diary. He had always found something to blame his failure on, but lately he was running out of fingers to point. It had now been an hour since he set out on his hunt to find something, anything, he could write about, but none of his ideas were working. All of them featured violent, unpleasant deaths and made no sense. They were, as his father called them, ‘a waste of ink’. At first, David’s father had been supportive of his love...

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The Script

Tom PYLE

Weekly Contest #350

The Script I’m on the phone talking with Phil, our recently recruited special effects wizard from over at CMT, Inc., (Well, wizard might be a little strong since he’s only a newly hired second deputy assistant or something like that, still in High School I think, but, anyway, our budget’s tight and he’s available so...) when our office door bangs open, slamming against the faded wall, rattling the framed old movie posters hanging there and lo and behold in walks Bill. He looks at me, sighs heavily, then plops down on our beat-u...

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