Short Story by J. D. Salinger. A youth leader entertains members of a boy’s club with tales of an imaginary anti-hero, the Laughing Man. The boys are accepting when a girl comes into the leader’s life, and appalled when the pair breakup and he “kills off” the Laughing Man.
Quick Read by Horacio Quiroga. A young bride is confined to bed after wasting away following months of inattention and isolation in her new husband’s cold, cavernous unwelcoming house. To add to the couple’s misfortune, a “monster” in the woman’s feather pillow slowly drains her lifeblood.
Short Story by Flannery O’Connor. A widow who runs a large farm is visited by three teenage boys wanting a horse ride. When she refuses, they spend the next two days committing petty acts of vandalism around the farm. A threat to call the sheriff results in her greatest fear.
Short Story by Richard Wright. An elderly man working the night desk at a seedy waterfront hotel is used to handling all kinds of rough customers. However, when the “biggest, strangest, and blackest” sailor he’d ever seen asks for a room, he is irrationally terrified.
Novelette by Oscar Wilde. An American family disrupts the peaceful existence of a ghost that has happily haunted a British house for over three hundred years. They not only refuse to be scared, but turn the tables with a series of practical jokes that leave the ghost humiliated and dejected.