Skip to main content

Short stories 291-300

I have fallen way behind with my reporting of the short story challenge because I keep finding more interesting subjects to post about, but here is one more report:

  • “The Ghost of a Hand” by J. Sheridan Le Fanu. About a ghost that only shows its hand. 
  • “The Sweeper” by A.M. Burrage. The tale of a woman haunted by an event from her past.
This ends October.

  • “Couching at the Door” by D.K. (Dorothy Kathleen) Broster. About the dangers of dabbling in the dark arts. Highly recommended.
  • “The Familiar” by Sheridan Le Fanu. About a man haunted by a demon from his past. Very boring.
  • “Full Fathom Five” by Alexander Woollcott. A very short tale that sounds like a “true” ghost story.
  • “The Millvale Apparition” by Louis Adamic. About a painter working in a church who encounters an apparition/ghost.

We now come to Roald Dahl’s Book of Ghost Stories, a collection of ghost stories chosen by Dahl, who, I think everyone who has read his books will agree, knew his stuff when it came to chilling tales. I found it hard to restrain myself not to finish the book, but I have a specific theme for November (which I will reveal the next time I post about this challenge) so I decided to save those of the rest that don’t fit that theme for later. Maybe I’ll read them to counterbalance the Christmas stories I plan to read in December.
  • “In the Tube” by E.F. Benson. A creepy tale about a ghost of the living and a ghost of the dead.
  • “Elias and the Draug” by Jonas Lie. A tale of a man who has a fateful encounter with a sea-ghost, modelled on the narrative techniques of folk-tales.
  • “Playmates” by A.M. Burrage. A well-plotted ‘gentle’ ghost story. Recommended.
  • “Ringing the Changes” by Robert Aickman. About a honeymoon couple who encounter a frightening old ritual when they visit a small town on the coast of England. The masterfully controlled mounting tension, the horrifying climax and the inevitable resolution make this a tale to be highly recommended.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Hello! I just discovered your blog via the Top Ten Tuesday list, and saw this post about your short story project. What a great idea. Like you, I have several hefty short story anthologies lying around the house. My book club also does a "short story month" at least once a year (or twice when we do "ghost story month") and it is always one of our most popular meetings.
-Jay
Bibliophile said…
Thanks for commenting, Jay.
I have always liked reading short stories, but with such a huge TBR stack I have tended to overlook them. The challenge was a way for me to go back to that love and start reading them again.

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove

First book of 2020: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach (reading notes)

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I loathe movie tie-in book covers because I feel they are (often) trying to tell me how I should see the characters in the book. The edition of Deborah Moggach's These Foolish Things that I read takes it one step further and changes the title of the book into the title of the film version as well as having photos of the ensemble cast on the cover. Fortunately it has been a long while since I watched the movie, so I couldn't even remember who played whom in the film, and I think it's perfectly understandable to try to cash in on the movie's success by rebranding the book. Even with a few years between watching the film and reading the book, I could see that the story had been altered, e.g. by having the Marigold Hotel's owner/manager be single and having a romance, instead being of unhappily married to an (understandably, I thought) shrewish wife. It also conflates Sonny, the wheeler dealer behind the retireme