Short stories!

I don't know about you, but I love short stories. I think their most endearing characteristic is that they're so short! (Duh.) And yet, if well-done, so effective! And intense! Take for instance this six word flash fiction allegedly written by Ernest Hemingway:

For sale: Baby shoes. Never used.

Genius, right? It gets me every time I read it. I mean, why'd somebody have baby shoes that have never been used? And then you tell yourself that story and he doesn't even have to spell it out! So, short stories: amazing! Here are my favourites, as non-spoiler-y as possible:

The October Game - Ray Bradbury

By the sound of the children you knew the calendar day. By their screams you knew what evening it was. You knew it was very late in the year. October. The last day of October, with white bone masks and cut pumpkins and the smell of dropped candle wax.

This is a mean story if there ever was one (the last line; the fucking last line), in that it never clearly states what's going on, but at some point you're like "waaaaaaaaaaaait" and watch the story unfold in a horrified and yet slightly amused and then again cringing state. (Okay, I did. I don't know about you. But it's just so mean I can't help but love it.)

The Lady of the House of Love - Angela Carter

Wearing an antique bridal gown, the beautiful queen of the vampires sits all alone in her dark, high house under the eyes of the portraits of her demented and atrocious ancestors, each one of whom, through her, projects a baleful posthumous existence; she counts out the Tarot cards, ceaselessly construing a constellation of possibilities as if the random fall of the cards on the red plush tablecloth before her could precipitate her from her chill, shuttered room into a country of perpetual summer and obliterate the perennial sadness of a girl who is both death and maiden.

Angela Carter is pure language love. Her prose, her imagery, is nothing short of beautiful, sensual, luscious, it makes you want to wear it and feel its dark, smooth, elegant velvet every second of your life and never take it off again. Yes. It's that beautiful.

The Hammer of God - G. K. Chesterton

Immediately beneath and about them the lines of the Gothic building plunged outwards into the void with a sickening swiftness akin to suicide. There is that element of Titan energy in the architecture of the Middle Ages that, from whatever aspect it be seen, it always seems to be rushing away, like the strong back of some maddened horse. (...) For these two men on the tower were left alone with the most terrible aspect of Gothic; the monstrous foreshortening and disproportion, the dizzy perspectives, the glimpses of great things small and small things great; a topsy-turvydom of stone in the mid-air. (...) The whole atmosphere was dizzy and dangerous, as if men were upheld in air amid the gyrating wings of colossal genii; and the whole of that old church, as tall and rich as a cathedral, seemed to sit upon the sunlit country like a cloudburst.

I think I may be the only person in the world with a soft spot for Chesterton. It's probably even less cool than having a soft spot for Miss Marple (which I also have). But ... Pater Brown. ♥

The End of the Party - Graham Greene

But they couldn't make him go; hesitating on the doorstep while the nurse's feet crunched across the frost-covered grass to the gate, he knew that. He would answer: "You can say I'm ill. I won't go. I'm afraid of the dark." And his mother: "Don't be silly. You know there's nothing to be afraid of in the dark." But he knew the falsity of that reasoning; he knew how they taught also that there was nothing to fear in death, and how fearfully they avoided the idea of it. But they couldn't make him go to the party. "I'll scream. I'll scream."

After reading this story it stayed with me for weeks. Its intense effect on me might've been partly due to the place I had read it - outside, in the middle of the night, in a little Filipino village open to the jungle bordering close to it that felt so wild and unknown and dangerous. But it's been there ever since, a remembrance of a punch in the gut, of a last line so horrible and threatening exactly because it was vague and open to all sorts of interpretation.

Give it up! - Franz Kafka

It was very early in the morning, the streets clean and deserted, I was on my way to the railroad station. As I compared the tower clock with my watch I realized it was already much later than I had thought, I had to hurry, the shock of this discovery made me feel uncertain of the way, I was not very well acquainted with the town yet, fortunately there was a policeman nearby, I ran to him and breathlessly asked him the way. He smiled and said: 'From me you want to learn the way?' 'Yes,' I said, 'since I cannot find it myself.' 'Give it up, give it up,' said he, and turned away with a great sweep, like someone who wants to be alone with his laughter.

I believe that one stands on its own. (Okay, it's not really a short story, but let's not be nitpicky here.)

The Picture in the House - H. P. Lovecraft

As I surveyed this quaint apartment, I felt an increase in that aversion first excited by the bleak exterior of the house. Just what it was that I feared or loathed, I could by no means define; but something in the whole atmosphere seemed redolent of unhallowed age, of unpleasant crudeness, and of secrets which should be forgotten. (...) The first object of my curiosity was a book of medium size lying upon the table and presenting such an antediluvian aspect that I marvelled at beholding it outside a museum or library. It was bound in leather with metal fittings, and was in an excellent state of preservation; being altogether an unusual sort of volume to encounter in an abode so lowly.

I find Lovecraft wildely ridiculous, mostly because he doesn't bother describing his Unspeakable Horrors From Outer Space, which is probably because of their Unspeakably Unspeakable Unspeakableness. At the same time, it makes them less horrible. In The Picture in the House he abandons his betentacled creatures of doom and tells a story of entirely human, tentacle-less horror, and it's awesome (still a bit wordy, though).

Miss Harriet - Guy de Maupassant

Love is always love, come whence it may. A heart that beats at your approach, an eye that weeps when you go away are things so rare, so sweet, so precious that they must never be despised.

... which is not a horror story. Yay! What a novelty! I picked up two copies of Maupassant short stories years ago. Mostly they're hit and miss, but I fell in love with the fragility, sadness and bitterness of Miss Harriet and have been ever since. It might also be a severe case of "Konstanze identifies too much with fictional characters", but hey, rejection is somewhat of a theme of my life, so let me tear up over a silly little story in peace, yes? ;)

The Pit and the Pendulum - E. A. Poe

And now, as I still continued to step cautiously onward, there came thronging upon my recollection a thousand vague rumors of the horrors of Toledo. Of the dungeons there had been strange things narrated -- fables I had always deemed them -- but yet strange, and too ghastly to repeat, save in a whisper. Was I left to perish of starvation in this subterranean world of darkness; or what fate, perhaps even more fearful, awaited me? That the result would be death, and a death of more than customary bitterness, I knew too well the character of my judges to doubt. The mode and the hour were all that occupied or distracted me.

I had a hard time choosing the right Poe story since they are so many amazing ones: The eerie Masque of the Red Death! The obscenely beautiful Gothic tale The Fall of the House of Usher! The Black Cat which gave me the chills back when I first read it! But The Pit and the Pendulum is just so nightmarish and claustrophobic and GAH I LOVE IT IT'S SO INTENSE.

The Selfish Giant - Oscar Wilde

"My own garden is my own garden," said the Giant; "any one can understand that, and I will allow nobody to play in it but myself." So he built a high wall all round it, and put up a notice-board.

TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED

He was a very selfish Giant.

This one has a special place in my heart. My Grandma used to read it to me when I was a child. It was in one of her Christian story books. (OSCAR WILDE. CHRISTIAN STORY BOOK. I KNOW RIGHT.) Whenever I hear the title, I go 'awww'. I love all of Wilde's fairy tales to tiny bits and pieces, but this one, this one is the happy part of my childhood, despite the sadness of the story itself. (It's a fairy tale, but we agreed not to be nitpicky, remember?)

---

I kind of adore Neil Gaiman's Lovecraft/Arthur Conan Doyle crossover A Study in Emerald, if only for the Victorian periodical look of the online version, and his rather bloody Snow White retelling Snow, Glass, Apples; The Yellow Face by Arthur Conan Doyle; and, of course, much love for Boccaccio's Masetto da Lamporecchio and the nuns and the changing beds one. :D

Deutsche Kurzgeschichten: Schischyphusch von Wolfgang Borchert und Janine feiert Weihnachten von Werner Wollenberger.

Your turn! What are your favourite short stories?