American writers of short fiction particularly exploited the genre to write gothic stories. Edgar Allan Poe and William Faulkner wrote some of the most popular gothic stories of their times. Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily and Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart are two of the most famous works among gothic stories written in America. Both authors use their respective ingenious ways to present their stories of horror including narrative skills, arrangements of time order, the use of images and themes. Both the authors represent the age that produced this sub-genre and popularized it. All in all, the two authors successfully not only create but also reinforce the feeling of horror with such unreliability and images. Hence, readers are being horror-struck and left in suspense throughout the whole stories. This paper discusses the gothic element in both the short stories.