The Yellow Wallpaper | Musings of the Monster Librarian

After my last post on how short stories are awesome, it was suggested to me that maybe I could make a few recommendations. So here you go– my totally subjective choices. These are stories that I personally have found memorable– either because I never, ever want to read them again, or because they draw me back, again and again. A few of them may not be in print anymore, and some are considered classics (you might have read them in school) but some are relatively new. Some might be considered YA, but don’t feel excluded! They are great reading for us older folks too. And I’d say nearly all of them have either a creep factor, or a fear factor (with the possible exception of “In The Jaws of Danger”. Almost all those images are clickable, just in case you’re interested in checking out these authors on your own. If you have a memorable short story of your own that you would like to share, I’d be very interested in your comments!

Please don’t be thrown off by the overuse of blockquotes. It’s hard to tell when I’m formatting what it will look like when I’m done, and frankly, while I was a little startled to see how it looked when I previewed it, I’m way too tired to fix it right now. Thanks for understanding!

“The Lurking Fear” by H.P. Lovecraft

My best friend in high school handed me her used copy of The Lurking Fear and Other Stories and said “You’ve gotta read this”! I handed it back to her after reading just this story, and have never read Lovecraft since. It terrified me that much.

“The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson

Anyone who has made it through high school without reading “The Lottery” should go do it right now. It is a chilling tale.

“High Beams”, collected by Alvin Schwartz

I love to tell this story to kids at Halloween, but it’s hard to go wrong with any story by Alvin Schwartz.

“The Tell-tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe

Poe is a master of the short story form. “The Tell-tale Heart” is only one of many memorable stories he has written: others include “The Cask of Amontillado”, “The Masque of the Red Death”, and “The Fall of the House of Usher”.

“The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury

Bradbury is another master of the short story. This list would be a much longer one if I included every story by him that I have found memorable. If you can believe it, I first read this in elementary school as part of the Junior Great Books program. I always found “The Veldt” to be a creepy story, and now that I’m a parent living in a hyperreal world, it’s chilling. Other stories I considered listing here included “A Sound of Thunder”, “There Will Come Soft Rains”, “The Flying Machine”, “The Third Expedition”, and, of course, Bradbury’s homage to Poe and to monster movies, “Usher II”

“Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut

Ah, the nightmare of a world where everyone is required to be average. Welcome to the Monkey House, which contains “Harrison Bergeron” also has a memorable title story involving Ethical Suicide Parlors, and one of my favorite stories of redemption ever, “The Kid Nobody Could Handle.”

“The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell

“Survivor” has nothing on this masterpiece about hunter and hunted.

“Leinengen Versus The Ants” by Carl Stephenson

I can’t think of a better illustration of “man vs. nature”, which is probably why this story appeared in my high school English textbook. By the way, this particular book I’ve linked to here also has some other great stories, including Ambrose Bierce’s “Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge” and Jack London’s “To Build a Fire”.

“We Can Get Them For You Wholesale” by Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman does a wonderful job with the short story form, be it in the flash fiction format used in Half Minute Horrors, the parody of “Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire”, or the poetic brutality of “Harlequin Valentine” (both in Fragile Things). “We Can Get Them For You Wholesale” is, for me, anyway, unforgettable.

“The Open Window” by Saki

Saki is brilliant. “The Open Window” is extremely creepy. Another story of his I find very thought-provoking is “The Toys of Peace”.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

A hallucinatory, semi-autobiographical tale of one woman’s descent into madness, this is also a vivid illustration of how many women with intelligence and will were treated at the time that it was written.

“Monster” by Kelly Link

“Monster” could have been just a tale about bullying gone horribly wrong. But it’s much more frightening than that. It’s nearly impossible to go wrong with this collection, though. There are notably creepy, weird, and fantastical stories in here. Kelly Link is a true artist.

“In The Jaws of Danger” by Piers Anthony

That cover image illustrates “In The Jaws of Danger” pretty effectively. Who knew dentistry could be so hazardous? Young Extraterrestrials is a book I treasure. It is filled with great stories, as you would expect from anthologists like Greenberg, Waugh, and Asimov. I can’t begin to tell you how many of their anthologies I devoured as a kid. Unfortunately it is now out of print.

“Mother of Monsters” by Guy de Maupassant

This is a truly horrifying story of calculated and twisted cruelty to children in the name of profit and fashion. Maupassant doesn’t need to get graphic to illustrate the tragedy and horror of the situation and of the culture that encourages it.

“Love Will Tear Us Apart” by Alaya Dawn Johnson

This fantastic story appears in the YA anthology Zombies vs. Unicorns. It’s about a zombie and a human who fall in love, and the sacrifices they both make to be together. There are many strong stories in the anthology, and it is well worth it to check it out.

“Nightfall” by Isaac Asimov

If the stars should appear for just one night in a thousand years, how would humanity react? The answer: not well. This is classic Asimov. I read it first in high school, and I keep coming back to it. Make sure you’ve got the story and not the novel.

It’s Women in Horror Month, that time of year when we recognize the amazing women who celebrate and create the horror genre. When it comes to horror fiction, there don’t seem to be very many names that appear in the past. Of course, there’s always Mary Shelley, but, while she was exceptional in many ways, she certainly wasn’t the only woman of her time writing gothic and horror stories .

Anyone who is surprised by this hasn’t read Little Women. Here’s Jo March, the most unconventional of the four March sisters, burning up with her desire to write:

Every few weeks she would shut herself up into her room, put on her scribbling suit, and “fall into a vortex,” as she expressed it, writing away at her novel with all her heart and soul, for till that was finished she could find no peace.

Jo’s family is much more supportive of her than most families were: writing was not only considered unsuitable for women, but unhealthy (and that’s literal– if you want to read a seriously twisted horror story, try Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s semi-autobiographical story “The Yellow Wallpaper”). But at the same time, the reality of daily life meant that women somehow had to support their families, and many of them did it by writing (KC Redding-Gonzales has written about it here). The writing that earned a steady paycheck, though, was pulp fiction for magazines and newspapers– “sensational stories” that gave their readers thrills, chills, romance, and murder. So that’s what Jo does. Her publisher “rejected any but thrilling tales” so that’s what she wrote, but with no name attached. Little Women‘s author, Louisa May Alcott, supported her family by writing sensational stories for ten years under a pen name, including a novel, A Long and Fatal Love Chase. But in the end, conventional Louisa won out, and, as in Little Women, where Jo finally gives up her writing, she stopped (this review from Stephen King has more on Louisa).

Alcott, Gilman, and the fictional Jo are just three examples from that time, though (even Frankenstein was first published under a pseudonym)– and we can’t know, really, how many women supplied horror, romance, suspense, ghost stories, and gothic fiction for pulp magazines, newspapers, and even three volume novels, since so many of them, like Jo, left their work unsigned, or like Alcott, wrote under a pen name. They did it because they loved writing, or needed money, or both, and whether they were proud of their work or ashamed of it, these scribbling women shaped popular culture. Many of them may be nameless, but they shouldn’t be forgotten.