Birthday (short story collection) Puns

Just finished reading both these short stories and this is my first time reading a short story collection by Murakami. I'm not quite sure what The Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman was all about. Also did that girl wish for having a good married life? Can someone tell me something about both these stories that could maybe help me understand it a little better?

Thank you 😊

The holiday season and the New Year can be a very busy time. It's very satisfying to start something and finish it in the same sitting so I'm recommending my all-time favorite Horror Short Story Collections. Maybe read one or two stories between baking cookies, wrapping presents, or doing your New Year Resolution exercises? *No particular order

MILESTONE by Kealan Patrick Burke

13 VIEWS OF THE SUICIDE WOODS by Bracken MacLeod

EVERY HOUSE IS HAUNTED by Ian Rogers

CRUEL WORKS OF NATURE by Gemma Amor

THE BONE MOTHER by David Demchuk

GREENER PASTURES by Michael Wehunt

SHE SAID DESTROY by Nadia Bulkin

EVERYTHING THAT'S UNDERNEATH by Kristi DeMeester

GROWING THINGS by Paul Tremblay

LITTLE BLACK SPOTS by John F. D. Taff

BONES ARE MADE TO BE BROKEN by Paul Michael Anderson

MINOTAUR by C. S. Humble

BONES by Andrew Cull

DARKEST HOURS by Mike Thorn

ENTROPY IN BLOOM by Jeremy R. Johnson

WE SHOULD HAVE LEFT WELL ENOUGH ALONE by Ronald Malfi

CASCADES by Craig Davidson (aka Nick Cutter!)

OUT OF WATER by Sarah Read

NORTH AMERICAN LAKE MONSTERS or WOUNDS by Nathan Ballingrud

ELEMENTS OF MY ANATOMY by Hailey Piper

GHOST SUMMER by Tananarive Due

20th CENTURY GHOSTS by Joe Hill

JUST AFTER SUNSET by Stephen King (that story, N.)

CHILDREN OF THE FANG by John Langan

THE STRANGE THING WE BECOME and Other Dark Tales by Eric LaRocca

THE OCTOBER COUNTRY by Ray Bradbury

AND HER SMILE WILL UNTETHER THE UNIVERSE by Gwendolyn Kiste

SOMETHING BORROWED, SOMETHING BLOOD SOAKED by Christa Carmen

BOOKS OF BLOOD Vol 1-3 by Clive Barker

On my TBR to finish, collections by: Laird Barron, Gemma Files, Stephen Graham Jones, and A.C. Wise

Always looking for recommendations!

I’m trying to remember the name of this collection of children’s short horror stories from my childhood. This book has to be from around the year 1995/98. I don’t believe it’s the infamous Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark because I remember the art style being very different. One of the short stories I vividly remember is a girl’s rambunctious and spoiled brother ruining her birthday party. I forget most of the details but at the end a monster appears at her window, it’s a big monster with a giant month and huge fang hanging out. It promises to take care of her brother if she just opens the window, the girl does and the monster eats her. Even anybody else remembers the name of the story or the collection it’s from, I’d really appreciate it.

Hi, I'm looking for collections of short stories. I'm into sci-fi, fantasy, etc. Willing to try most anything.

Two collections I have are Sherlock Holmes (Stephen Fry), and Stephen Fry's Mythos collection.

I've thought about the Canterbury Tales, but I'm not sure which one to buy.

Sorry if this has been said a 1000 times already, as I cannot have my phone 9 hours A-day at work.

Just let me know, and I'll delete the post 🙂

A thought just occurred to me that it would be really great to have a short story collection about the post ring shutdown scenarios.

Particularly, I would love to see a short story that explores a colony that was dependent on trade and was doomed after the shutdown.

What short stories would you like to see explored in that collection.

These past months I've been digging Lovecraft's mythos and other horror short stories collections, I'm very much liking the cosmic horror setting and interconnection that comes from having all stories set on the same universe and I've been wondering if there's something like that but in high fantasy.

Specifically a compendium of short stories that build a mythos and expand the world little by little. It doesn't have to be cosmic horror but I'd like it to be something more than just dark fantasy.

edit: Thank you all for the suggestions, tbh I didn't think this was a niche genre but I'll check out all recommendations here, ty

I haven't read many short stories, but I have had several people tell me that I should give them a try. (specifically because my writing struggles with endings and tight story structure, which short stories are good at). Any recommendations on some of the best collections of them?

I am up for whatever, but if it helps you come up with a recommendation, my favorite books are: Gideon the ninth, a wizard of earth sea, hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, the name of the wind, guards guards, brave new world, slaughterhouse 5, and the graveyard book. However I am always up for expanding my tastes!

Thanks to this subreddit I was able to deep dive into a bunch of short story collections. My favorites are of course all Stephen King collections specifically Night Shift through Nightmares and Dreamscapes. Books of Blood falls within my top shelf for what I’m looking for too.

So far the closest thing that came to hitting what I’m looking for was Laird Barron’s “Occultation”. But that was very much a Books of Blood vibe more than SK.

Stuff that I’ve read that doesn’t quite fit: Blue World, Dark Companions, Ligotti’s stuff, a lot more. I most recently had to stop “Greener Pastures” as it was just too weird and incoherent. A similar experience that I had with Laird Barron’s “The Imago Sequence.”

For me King is the GOAT, so the bar is set high. Not so much interested in Joe Hill’s collections though.

Thank you all!

Also, I’m very interested in any occult based horror, so please recommend some as well.

I start with Dangerous Visions and Mirrorshades. What others?

Looking for recommendations of short story collections translated into English. Currently working through Broken Stars (translated from Chinese by Ken Liu).

Kind of a clunky title, but basically I'm writing a collection of in-universe fantasy short stories. What I mean by in-universe is that they're all taking place at the same time and in the same world. My plan was to write an actual fantasy novel next and have some of the characters return (pretty much like the Witcher books).

For an author that hasn't published anything, is there an advised minimum or maximum word count per short story and per novel?

I'm around 75k words now and I'm wondering if that length for a collection of short stories is enough to deter some people. If my outline goes as planned, I'd finish around 85k words. Would it be better to split the short stories into two separate books? Or does none of this matter if I plan to do the Kindle Unlimited route because all that matters is how many pages get read?

Is any of this worth considering or am I overthinking all of this?

Also just good sci-fi authors in general, or just specific short stories. If you want something to go off of, I like darker stuff. I’ve enjoyed the Ray Bradbury stories I’ve read, my favorite being “There Will Come Soft Rains”, I liked Stephen King’s sci-fi story “The Jaunt” as well. I like my fiction bleak. Thanks.

Edit: I really like their work on the anthology The Weird, so I ordered The Big Book of Science Fiction by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer. Thanks everyone

Hello friends,

When I was about 11, my grandma let me take home a collection of horror stories from the '70s.

I think it was published by Penguin books (or by another large UK publisher). It had a really odd cover that kinda looked like 70s Soviet impressionistic artwork.

The book made a big impression on me, and whilst I doubt the stories within are classics, I suddenly have the urge to try and track it down.

I believe the cover was predominantly green. It featured a daemonic looking tree or a house with a face surrounded by a landscape of rolling hills. I believe there was orange on the cover. I believe it was titled something along the lines of "short stories of terror" or similar, possibly for young adults. I want to say it was published 1975 or 1976.

The stories that stuck with me were:

• A guy who ended up staying over at a creepy house, where an orphan kid who had a hare lip was staying. He sees the ghost of the kids mother. In the morning the kid is nowhere to be found. He gets to a local hotel, only for the proprietor to inform him that the kid died ten years ago too.

• A 18th century aristocrat having an encounter with a ghost. Told in the form of a series of letters.

• A story about a guy who works in a computer lab. He's found dead Inna car crash at some co-ordinates that a supercomputer kept coming up with.

This is probably a huge longshot, but can anyone help track it down?

Edit: I found it! It's called The House of the Nightmare & Other Eerie Tales, chosen by Kathleen Lines.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81-lZ+TBJxL.jpg

Enjoy! Love the community, keep on creating content! Keep on writing, reading, and narrating!

eBook Here

I'm a fan of Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected, Kiss Kiss and etc. I'm looking for an author who writes in a similar vein. Non-supernatural horror short stories that have strange plot twists. I've also read Shirley Jackson's The Lottery and Other Stories. I'm interested in collections from about the same time period as Jackson and Dahl, but I would prefer it if they were a bit more modern.

I got this book at my primary school book fair in Northern Ireland in the early 2000s. It had a name like tales/stories of mystery, horror and something else. Sorry for the vagueness but it definitely had three descriptions. The stories were split into three categories: horror, mystery and then whatever the other description was. There was also a story about the mysterious coincidences surrounding Abraham Lincoln's assassination. Any help would be appreciated, been trying to find this for years! Thanks!

The Beginning

It was my first month at my school, April, at Oarai Girls' Academy. The sakura petals were everywhere the eyes can see - some flying about in the air as the breeze blew them from the sakura trees, while some were already on the ground being swept gently along the pavement. Looking at the signage on the door which read "Student Council President" before me, I took in a deep breath, and knocked on the door.

"Come on in", the voice sounded. With my right hand pushing the door handle downwards and gently applying pressure with my right shoulder onto the wooden door, I made my way in. There was the sight of a well-lit room from a window with the back of the chair turned fully facing the door. I walked towards the table, and came to a gentle stop with my two feet close together after ensuring that there was nothing untoward the white sailor uniform with green trim and black ribbon tie.

"Good morning, Kaichou", I made sure to give a greeting as proper as I can.

"G'morning, Yuzu", came the reciprocating greeting. And the chair turned about fully, allowing one to see that she had something in her mouth chewing away on top of having a packet on her left hand.

"Ehhh kaichou...did you have a proper breakfast?", I asked the girl with brown hair tied into her usual twintails look.

"Yes, yes of course I did...but then, this is Oarai's famous product y'know...", she replied while chewing away.

Internally I thought, so this is a day as usual, huh. She, chewing on sweet dried potatoes...oh wait. I forgot that the other day she took a little longer than usual with looking through the budget approval that I handed to her for her viewing before the submission deadline. She was really meticulous with it, which is unusual, meaning that the three of us left together later than usual, too. Now I get the picture: she definitely slid something into some category somewhere for her supplies.

"Hey Yuzu", she called out before placing in the next piece into her mouth, "Later when Momo arrives, let us proceed to discuss about how to put that plan into action". She then opens her mouth to put in another piece of her snack.

"Eh what was that again?", I asked to be sure of what I had just heard.

She looked at me, making full eye contact for a brief second. She never does so - unless it is something of substance.

"What I told that glasses m

As the title says

I've found a few novelists and short story writers with an inborn sense of irony and extremely dry humor but they're hard to come across.

I have an idea.

Recently, I completed a short story that I am incredibly proud of, my first true story. My plan is to try and submit this story as well as some poems to a few magazines. No matter if it gets accepted or not, afterwards, I plan to create illustrations for them.

This got me thinking; what if I write and illustrate a bunch of short stories and poems? Would there be an audience for that sort of thing? How many short stories and poems would I need? And, how long would the collection need to be?

What do you think? Thank you, in advance.

PS, if your curious about the short story: Spores ravish the lands, adhering to skin for their roots to burrow into, stealing their host’s life for their own. Not being able to just sit and watch his wife and son be eaten by this spore plague, Liam, a ranch hand, volunteers to follow a map to someone who claims to know a cure. His journey for said cure takes him through the origin of the spores, where multi-eyed and multi-legged creatures roam. Will Liam survive the trip or will he succumb to the plague?

Hiya,

I've got a handful of already published short stories and another few accepted for publication. I've got about 10 more out on submissions and another 10 I'm working on which I hope to complete within the next year or so, maybe one per month.

Ultimately, I want to compile a short story collection and shop it for publication, but I am struggling with (1) how to compile my short story collection and (2) how to shop it. I've googled about it, but I'm just not finding the sort of professional/realistic feedback I feel like I need in order to do this right.

My inspiration for short story collections fall somewhere between Hassan Blasim's The Corpse Exhibition to Stephen King's Different Seasons: 4 Novellas to Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried to Ken Liu's The Paper Menagerie.

I've got 8-12k stories and I've got 1.5-5k stories. None of the characters are the same from one to the next. But they do all revolve around the same themes and subject matter (veteran-military-war stories with speculative elements, often taking place just outside or beyond the combat zone, often told from a non-soldier's point of view, or even the point of view of a drone, or a base, or an ancient goddess).

I just don't know how to put them together. What guidelines to follow for which to include and which to leave out. What publishers/agents for short story collections might even be looking for (there's not a terribly huge market for them...) and how I can scope my own collection along reader's and publisher's expectations.

Or should I just drop the whole idea of a short story collection and go write the novel I've been thinking about? "D

Thank you for any guidance you can lend!

I’m looking for a book of short stories - I believe it’s an anthology rather than the stories all being written by the same author, however I may be wrong about that and ready to be told differently.

The stories all had a Christmas theme to them and were horror / chiller stories aimed at a teenage / YA market (people aged 12-16 I’d guess). The only story I really remember involved a person driving home to be with their family for Christmas and during the drive they detour to a mysterious deserted (?) village. I think it turns out that >! the main character crashed their car on the road during the journey and was unconscious and imagined the whole village. !<

I would have read this book sometime between 1999 - 2004 and I was in the UK. It was gifted to me as a Christmas present.

If I recall correctly the book was a paperback and maybe ~200 pages.

It’s not one of the Point Horror collections - this book specifically had a Christmas theme to all of the stories.

usually find short story books vaguely unsatisfying but just finished The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans and thought it was amazing. what really stood out to me was how well connected each story was thematically it kind of reminded me of an album the way they flowed together even tho each story was so different. is that a common thing in all short story collections that i just missed or is this an outlier? in general thoughts on short story collections?

Single-author collections and multi-author anthologies are both fine. Thanks!

For me I’ll go with

Anything by Ligotti

The Secret of Ventriloquism by Jon Padgett

Songs for the Unravelling of the World by Brian Evenson

EDIT: SOLVED Sorry if I messed up somehow this is my first time posting. Basically, the book contains multiple short stories and these are the ones I remember: One of them is about a super jealous girl who’s ex got a new girlfriend. The girl goes to a witch I think or preforms a spell somehow to give the new girlfriend bad luck but it backfired. So the crazy girl has the bad luck. I know that peanut butter containers hit her or she gets hit by a car or something but she ends up in the hospital. She somehow gets a lobotomy and the story ends with the narrator basically saying the girl can’t even remember who she is or what is going on and that she doesn’t even mind the drool dripping down from her mouth. Another story is about a mean girl who buys this red dress (from a thrift store I think, from a dead girl) and somehow she “dies” so her family buries her. But she wakes up in the coffin underground and she scratches at it until her finger nails are gone and her hands are bloody (and she dies). It turns out she had some condition (which was triggered by the chemicals from the red dress) which made her pulse SUPER faint everyone thought she was dead. And the last story was about this boy who would kill people (accidentally) by saying I love you or kissing them (he was cursed or something I think). My sister got this book from the library when she was in/near middle school so it is probably for young teens.

There was a collection of short stories that my teachers used to read to us in elementary school. It was about a school with 100 floors and each story was a different floor or something. In one of the stories a substitute teacher came and was able to mimic the students voices. The substitute teacher called all the students parents to say their children didn’t love them. In another the main teacher got pregnant and was eating “bologna-O’s” which is an Oreo cookie with bologna instead of cream filling.

After wating Denis Villeneuve's Dune, I had to read both the book and watch Villeneuve's other movies

And after watching Arrival I wanted to read the book too, but I heard that it's adapted from a short story and quite a few changes were made to it

Are Chiang's short story collections on par with the movie's story

Hi! I’m trying to find a short story anthology/collection I read as a kid. I would have likely picked it up from Barnes and Noble and I think it had a red and black cover. It had a handful of stories and I only can (vaguely) remember two of them:

• One with a lonely boy who befriends a ghost that I believe lures him into drowning

• One with a woman staying as a guest in a home by a forest populated by monkeys. I’m pretty sure she antagonizes them somehow and is killed by the monkeys

Pretty bleak but I’m fairly sure it was geared towards younger readers?

I’ve tried googling the stories and browsing goodreads but nothing so far. Thanks!

I saw the thread about finding SK scary and the top comments suggest his short stories are actually scarier, so I want to pick up one and have a read.

Hello everyone. This is my first time writing a horror story. Please bear with me if there are any errors or weird writing. Names of people involved have been altered. This is also only an account of my perspective, and another friend of mine has the full story. He is in the process of writing his own account as far as I know, but I thought it would be fun if I provided my own account as well.

Hope you enjoy it.

I'm a person who enjoys role-playing games of all kinds. I started playing jrpgs from childhood, and as I grew older I started looking into other mediums as well. I got interested in DnD during 2017 because I found out that Matt Mercer voiced a character that I liked. From there, I tried many times to find a group I could join and learn the game with, but I kept failing until mid to late 2020 where I actually managed to join a game when I got invited by a friend.

At this point I have been trying for 3 or so years (it was harder for me to find games due to my timezone), so when I joined the DM's discord server, I was incredibly excited to go through all the motions of playing a true DnD game for the first time.

My first encounter with the DM went well as far as I could remember. We introduced ourselves… talked about the game… he expressed passion for what he's doing, and it really gave me a positive vibe, like I can put all the past failed attempts at getting into dnd behind me and finally enjoy something good.

The one hiccup that I could remember was how he seemed to really heavily dislike anime, which I'm fine with because I understand that it's not for everyone.

From then on, some weeks passed, and some other people came and went before our group was solidified. We ended up with…

Human Samurai, played by Soul Aarakocra Warlock, played by Gleb Elven Rogue, played by Me Drow Druid, played by Spider And Human Fighter, played by my friend who will be called Vane.

I was excited after finding out about our lineup, and could barely contain myself before the first session came along. But all I could remember now from that first session was boredom. Essentially what happened was that Spider and Gleb's characters were captured due to their race being exotic, and were sold into a coliseum to fight for entertainment. Vane fought Spider in a 1v1 pvp battle at level 1, which involved little to nothing except slapping swords around and throwing some cantrips. Once the fight was over, (Vane lost to Spider) we found out that an important government

Hello friends,

When I was about 11, my grandma let me take home a collection of horror stories from the '70s.

I think it was published by Penguin books (or by another large UK publisher). It had a really odd cover that kinda looked like 70s Soviet impressionistic artwork.

The book made a big impression on me, and whilst I doubt the stories within are classics, I suddenly have the urge to try and track it down.

I believe the cover was predominantly green. It featured a daemonic looking tree or a house with a face surrounded by a landscape of rolling hills. I believe there was orange on the cover. I believe it was titled something along the lines of "short stories of terror" or similar, possibly for young adults. I want to say it was published 1975 or 1976.

The stories that stuck with me were:

• A guy who ended up staying over at a creepy house, where an orphan kid who had a hare lip was staying. He sees the ghost of the kids mother. In the morning the kid is nowhere to be found. He gets to a local hotel, only for the proprietor to inform him that the kid died ten years ago too.

• A 18th century aristocrat having an encounter with a ghost. Told in the form of a series of letters.

• A story about a guy who works in a computer lab. He's found dead Inna car crash at some co-ordinates that a supercomputer kept coming up with.

This is probably a huge longshot, but can anyone help track it down?