Best short-short stories? My list would be
1. "The Hound", by HP Lovecraft. It accomplishes every kind of horror with superb literary economy, is permeated by a wonderfully fatalistic sensibility, and the atmosphere is arguably even more potent than his later stories. I don't think it gets much better than that.
2. "An Encounter", by James Joyce. Three pages of fear and an insight into the hypocrisy of youth. That final line is the killer.
3. "The Tell-Tale Heart", Edgar Allan Poe. "The Man of the Crowd" is his best short story overall, but obviously doesn't qualify.
4. "From Beyond", HP Lovecraft. A six-page story whose crux is the flick of a light-switch could not possibly be scary, no?
5. "A Diagnosis of Death", Ambrose Bierce. DD aside, Bierce is awful much of the time, but this is a virtuoso display at 4 pages.
6. "The Occupant of the Room", Algernon Blackwood - if you haven't read any Blackwood and don't appreciate how wonderful he is, at ten pages this is the perfect place to start.
7. "Through Channels", Richard Matheson. Seven pages of Matheson at his relentless best with a remarkable narrative mechanism I don't think I've ever seen before.
8. "Strawberry Spring", Stephen King. As atmospheric as he's ever been, and doing so much with so little.
9. "The Man Who Loved Flowers", King again. Seven pages about love and madness, executed perfectly - the shock value is more than just a gimmick.
10. "A School Story", by MR James. His best is obviously still "Oh Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad", but at seven pages this is very unsettling. I remember having one sleepless night over the line "If you don't come to me, I'll come to you", and the concrete, elliptical paragraph James habitually inserts as the conclusion to every short is even more brutal here than elsewhere in his work.
PS: And not forgetting this, of course -
http://www.templeofdagon.com/artwork/rick-sardinha/Dagon.jpg
Originally posted by AmauroteI'm not intelligent enough to ready anything without pictures.
Best short-short stories? My list would be
1. "The Hound", by HP Lovecraft. It accomplishes every kind of horror with superb literary economy, is permeated by a wonderfully fatalistic sensibility, and the atmosphere is arguably even more potent than his later stories. I don't think it gets much better than that.
2. "An Encounter", by James Joyce. Thre ...[text shortened]... http://www.templeofdagon.com/artwork/rick-sardinha/Dagon.jpg
Originally posted by AmauroteRoald Dahl's short story of the woman who kills her husband and feeds the evidence to the cops.
Best short-short stories? My list would be
1. "The Hound", by HP Lovecraft. It accomplishes every kind of horror with superb literary economy, is permeated by a wonderfully fatalistic sensibility, and the atmosphere is arguably even more potent than his later stories. I don't think it gets much better than that.
2. "An Encounter", by James Joyce. Thre ...[text shortened]... http://www.templeofdagon.com/artwork/rick-sardinha/Dagon.jpg
Originally posted by shavixmir"Lamb to the Slaughter", shav; funnily enough, I've just read that, great stuff - and I've got "More Tales of the Unexpected" on order. I think "Man From the South" is the best in the collection, though, and I'm just about old enough to remember the series. Intro sequence always creeped me out, I probably had "women issues"...
Roald Dahl's short story of the woman who kills her husband and feeds the evidence to the cops.
Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption is a novella rather than a short story, but I hear so much about it I'm going to have to pluck it from the shelf at some point. The film is wonderful, and yet if you look at it in the cold light of day it's filled with every prison cliche imaginable. In that sense it probably works on the same level as Casablanca.
