Although very short (just over 1,400 words), there are enough dark elements in this Shirley Jackson story to unsettle most readers. An imaginative four-year-old travelling on a train with his mother and infant sister attracts the attention of a man who recounts how much he loved his own sister. The man then relates how, after killing and dismembering his sister, he fed her head to a bear. The story turns on who or what the man is, and what effect his story may have on the boy. Themes include parental inattention, boredom, imagination, witchcraft, innocence and its possible manipulation, violence. More…
Dry September
William Faulkner’s Dry September deals with events leading up to and shortly after the vigilante murder of a presumably innocent man. Set in a racially prejudiced community in America’s South, a misplaced or malicious complaint from a middle-aged spinster incites hatred against a local negro. Only one man (the town barber) stands up for him. A decorated ex-soldier leads a mob to avenge the woman’s honor. After the killing, the reliability of the woman’s story is called into question, as is the mental condition of the soldier who is shown to be violent by nature and possibly suffering from PTSD. More…
The Imp of the Perverse
Like two of our earlier Edgar Allan Poe tales (The Back Cat and The Tell-Tale Heart), this story involves an unreliable, unhinged narrator facing execution for murder trying to account for his crime. He blames his actions on an agent he claims to be in all of us called the “Imp of the Perverse”. The Imp, he argues, is an urge that drives people to do things they shouldn’t for the simple reason that they know it to be wrong. Ironically, the Imp that drove him to murder also drove him to confess. Themes include perverseness, obsession, madness, self-destruction. More…
A Lifestyle
In this story by Fernando Sorrentino a man relates how being trapped inside his tenth-floor apartment after his key broke off in the lock changed his life. After being refused service and black-listed by the Argentine Locksmiths’ Union, he looks for help elsewhere. He phones the building janitor, his girlfriend and co-workers, and even drops pamphlets to pedestrians on the street below. No one is willing to assist. When his telephone, power and water are cut off, the innovative man develops a thriving farm in his apartment. Themes include resourcefulness, self-sufficiency, isolation, the apathy and redundancy of urban lifestyles. More…
Woman Hollering Creek
Cleófilas, Sandra Cisneros’s Mexican protagonist, finds the grass no greener when she marries and moves to a town “on the other side”. Poverty, language and distance leave her with nobody to turn to when her dreams of love and passion become a nightmare. Fortunately, her father has foreseen the possibility and left the home door open. Thanks to a kind woman with a pickup truck and piercing scream, she returns stronger and, one hopes, empowered to strive for a better future. Themes: parental vs. romantic love, cultural traditions (wives as ‘property’), gender roles, isolation, marital abuse. More…