This 3-4K word length batch has a few perennial favorites that have been taught and anthologized endlessly. If you’re hardcore enough, you’ll recognize a few others that are acknowledged classics in some circles. As usual, this story length is a quantum leap over the last one, in terms of how much an author can stretch out, but we’re still in the territory where it’s short enough for a general audience.
I’ve been seeing stories clump in this word count range and the next one. My guess is that 3-5 K is a good word count to shoot for, if you want to write a story that doesn’t feel long, but still has some heft to it.
ADD Bernard Malamud, The Jewbird 3085
Thomas Ligotti, Les Fleurs 3036
Serial killer stories are everywhere at this point, but horror/weird fiction master Ligotti takes a typically unconventional approach to that subgenre here. You have to squint to figure out what sort of violence is happening in this story; his narrator cheerfully avoids giving us details. He doesn’t seem to feel that we need them.
I don’t know any writers who are better than Ligotti at giving us a casually conversational psychotic.
I myself had despaired to find that within Clare’s dark and promisingly moody borders lay a disappointing dreamland of white picket fences and flower-printed curtains. No, I didn’t tell that to the detective.
Clark Ashton Smith, The Weird Of Avoosl Woothoqquan 3208
I like to talk about this story, and this writer, because the title is a classic example of something that makes me avoid fantasy and science fiction— the use of absurdly elaborate made-up names.
This is (presumably) the best of all ridiculously named fantasy short stories.
Smith, a colleague of Lovecraft, is still mostly known to connoisseurs, but his short stories are currently all in print, suggesting the existence of a pretty dedicated cult. His purple prose is about the purplest you’ll find anywhere, but it’s also eerie and evocative. I’ve never seen anyone whose overwritten passages are this lyrical; his style was really idiosyncratic, and if you like his voice, you’ll forgive him for his excesses. He has so many bursts of color and rhythm in his language that you’re surprised to find that he could really spin a yarn.
Clark Ashton Smith is a great model if you want your fantasy writing to skew more poetic than ponderous. And here’s a tip, if you are on the verge of guessing that the trick to this sort of writing is to learn a bunch of esoteric words: any style involving big words will succeed or fail based on the author’s choice of rhythmic phrases.
If you look carefully at this passage— and reading it out loud helps— you’ll see or hear that there are chains of rhythmic ideas, and then an idea will be retired, and a fresh one brought in. I would guess that Smith had a sense of how the rhythms should flow, and would pick words and sentence structure to fit the effect he wanted. Incidentally, if you want to be a writer, in any style, I recommend thinking about how syllables are used to make a rhythmic phrase. It’s my theory that humans hear rhythms and attacks more clearly than they hear words, and they respond emotionally to those nonverbal phrases more than they do to the actual words.
There were pale and ice-clear topazes from Mhu Thulan, and gorgeous crystals of tourmaline from Tscho Vulpanomi; there were chill and furtive sapphires of the north, and arctic carnelians like frozen blood, and southern diamonds that were hearted with white stars. Red, unblinking rubies glared from the coruscating pile, chatoyants shone like the eyes of tigers, garnets and alabraundines gave their somber flames to the lamplight amid the restless hues of opals.
John Collier, The Touch Of Nutmeg Makes It 3227
Even Oscar Wilde couldn’t blend cruelty and wit better than the unappreciated Collier. He’s better with language than a lot of so-called “literary fiction” writers, and more fun to read than virtually any of them. Collier was so consistently good that you tend to rate a story as one of his best solely on the basis of your enthusiasm for its novel premise, but even there he delivered the goods every time.
A bunch of Collier’s stories were adapted for Hitchcock’s TV shows, and if you’re a fan of those shows, you’ll know that this is recommendation enough.
Joan Aiken, A Leg Full Of Rubies 3249
Joan Aiken was a welcome find for me— a fantasist more in the L. Frank Baum mold than the Tolkien. I don’t love pretentious dialogue and world-building; I like it when fantastic characters can manage to talk like real people, and I like stories where the world is still our world, but mystical and outré things happen once in a while. (Note: before anyone jumps me in an alley— this may be my default preference, or prejudice, but I have made plenty of exceptions, and it has paid off.)
Kelly Link, one of our best current fantasy/weird fiction writers, has championed Joan, and she’s due for a reappraisal. Joan wrote nutty stories with a smart, no-nonsense attitude.
“Well, now, God be good to ye,” said Tom Mahone. “What can we do for ye at all?” And he poured a strong drop, to warm the four bones of him. “Is there a veterinary surgeon in this town?” Theseus inquired. Then they saw that the owl had a hurt wing, the ruffled feathers all at odds with one another. “Is there a man in this town can mend him?” he said. “Ah, sure Dr. Kilvaney’s the man for ye,” said they all. “No less than a magician with the sick beasts, he is. “And can throw a boulder farther than any man in the land.” “’Tis the same one has a wooden leg stuffed full of rubies.” “And keeps a phoenix in a cage.” “And has all the minutes of his life numbered to the final grain of sand—ah, he’s the man to aid ye.” And all the while the owl staring at them from great round eyes.
Delmore Schwartz, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities 3299
These days, Delmore may be best known for having been Lou Reed’s college professor. That’s the reason I know about him, and I even caught my son (a huge Velvet Underground fan) carrying a Delmore collection around at one point. Even back when Delmore was better known, though, it was mostly for his poetry.
So, most of you probably haven’t read this one. His short fiction output was scant, but among cognoscenti this story is legendary. Lou called it the best short story ever written, and while that sounds like hyperbole, the story absolutely lives up to the hype. It’s poignant, modernistic, and horrifying. And my comments about Clark Ashton Smith and rhythmic phrases apply here too. Schwartz and Smith were both poets, and they are both masters of rhythm.
My mother and father lean on the rail of the boardwalk and absently stare at the ocean. The ocean is becoming rough; the waves come in slowly, tugging strength from far back. The moment before they somersault, the moment when they arch their backs so beautifully, showing green and white veins amid the black, that moment is intolerable. They finally crack, dashing fiercely upon the sand, actually driving, full force downward, against the sand, bouncing upward and forward, and at last petering out into a small stream which races up the beach and then is recalled.
James Purdy, Daddy Wolf 3259
Purdy’s fans include Gordon Lish and John Waters. For some, that will be all you need to hear.
I don’t think it is Mabel and the kid leaving me so much sometimes as it is the idea of that Mama rat coming through the holes in the linoleum that has got me so down-in-the-dumps today. I didn’t even go to the mitten factory this a.m., and I have, like I say, got so down-in-the-dumps I almost felt like calling Daddy Wolf myself on the Trouble Phone like she did all the time. But knowing he won’t talk to nobody but ladies, as a kind of next-best-thing I put my finger down haphazard on top of this lady’s name in the phone book, and I sure appreciated having that talk with her. See Daddy Wolf would only talk with my wife for about one and a half minutes on account of other women were waiting to tell him their troubles. He would always say Go back to your affiliation with the Sunday school and church of your choice, Mabel, and you’ll find your burdens lighter in no time. Daddy said the same thing to her every night, but she never got tired hearing it, I guess.
Silvina Ocampo, The House Made Of Sugar 3300
Silvina was damnably odd; her stories are spooky and dreamlike, and she reminds me of Emily Dickinson. I assume that if Emily had tried her hand at short stories, she would have done it like Silvina, and they would have revealed nothing, folding in on themselves and haunting us for reasons we can’t put our fingers on.
This dreamlike approach isn’t for everybody, but it’s also rare as hen’s teeth. You don’t find it everywhere. Thanks to the New York Review of Books reissuing project, you can get this story and many others in one volume, and begin the process of walking around and around her work, trying to solve the crime.
This excerpt is Silvina talking about what writing is for her.
Writing is having a sprite within reach, something we can turn into a demon or a monster, but also something that will give us unexpected happiness or the wish to die.
Shirley Jackson, The Lottery 3369
If you’ve read this story, it’s a great one to go back to for a lesson in how you can use a story to mislead the reader, until you start ladling out the sickening realization that they’ve been had. Then you just push them into the pit.
It’s the gold standard for this sort of thing, whatever this sort of thing is, and the word count has a lot to do with it.
If you haven’t read it, it’s only my core of curmudgeonliness that’s keeping me from hopping up and down and squealing that you absolutely must read it before the next sunrise.
I used to work at a bookstore, many years ago. I was talking about Shirley Jackson and a fellow bookseller blurted out, “Shirley Jackson was a HACK writer!”
I don’t know where that guy is today. Probably dead.
Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Last Demon 3378
God, could he write. I suppose there must be some Nobel laureates that are overrated, but not this gentleman. I particularly love his tales about Satan’s field operatives; he has a knack for making us side with the demons.
Here’s a bit of dialogue between a demon sent to Tishevitz to corrupt an incorruptible rabbi, and his jaded colleague who’s been in the town already for two centuries without accomplishing much. (Most of the humans have managed to corrupt themselves without supernatural assistance.)
“This one I’ve got to get. This is my first job around here. I’ve been promised that if I succeed, I’ll be transferred to Odessa.” “What’s so good about that?” “It’s as near paradise as our kind gets. You can sleep twenty-four hours a day. The population sins and you don’t lift a finger.” “So what do you do all day?” “We play with our women.” “Here there’s not a single one of our girls.” The imp sighs.
“There was one old bitch but she expired.” “So what’s left?” “What Onan did.” “That doesn’t lead anywhere. Help me and I swear by Asmodeus’s beard that I’ll get you out of here. We have an opening for a mixer of bitter herbs. You only work Passovers.” “I hope it works out, but don’t count your chickens.” “We’ve taken care of tougher than he.”
A great tidbit:
According to the Talmud a scholar is permitted the eighth part of an eighth part of vanity. But a learned man generally exceeds his quota.
Bruno Schulz, The Street Of Crocodiles 3455
Schulz is a tough nut to figure out. A popular shorthand explanation is that he’s sort of a cousin of Kafka, and while that is a bit reductive— their styles are pretty different— it’s definitely true that they’re both eccentric and outré, while never letting on that there’s anything odd about their work. This story is a good place to start with him, and it may be the one that finishes you.
I can feel the influence of this Polish mystic in the work of Thomas Bernhard, Thomas Ligotti, Steven Millhauser, Bennett Sims, Lincoln Michel, Mark Samuels, and on and on; wherever you find writers perversely blending the baroque impulse with the grim haze of deadpan mystery, Schulz continues to live.
This excerpt is like my sliver of Clark Ashton Smith, with Smith’s exuberant colors all squashed into a dismal gray:
From this withered distance of its peripheries the city emerged and grew toward the front, even more toward the front in undifferentiated complexes, in compact blocks and masses of buildings, intersected by the deep ravines of streets, in order, even closer, to separate into individual apartment houses etched with the sharp clarity of views examined through a telescope. On these nearer planes the engraver had brought out all the tangled, manifold hubbub of the streets and alleys, the sharp clarity of cornices, architraves, archivolts, and pilasters, shining in the late, dark gold of an overcast afternoon that plunges every curve and window frame into the deep sepia of shadow.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Wakefield 3491
This weird story is an ancestor of Kafka and Bunuel. A husband disappears, and decades later they discover that he’s been living just down the street the WHOLE TIME HE WAS GONE. For some reason, that really gives me the creeps. I suspect this was one of the Hawthorne stories that influenced Melville.
Roald Dahl, The Landlady 3544
Dahl is of course known today for his many classic children’s books, but early on he was known for his amusingly creepy short stories. Don’t read them to your kids. Or anybody’s kids, really.
As with John Collier, Dahl’s work was often in the New Yorker, and he had some stories adapted for Hitchcock’s TV shows.
It’s interesting that this story is a similar length to Street Of Crocodiles, because they are very different experiences. This one zips along; it all but reads itself, whereas you can’t be lounging around languidly and get through Schulz’s story. It’s as if they’re the same size room, but the Schulz story is packed to the ceiling with boxes of irregular sizes and shapes, and you drop your keys and have trouble finding them again.
Dahl sometimes will have information lurking just outside the frame, and you start to see it, but the characters don’t. At least one character will be maddeningly slow at cottoning to whatever is going on.
To refine this kind of implied horror to where it’s this hard for a reader to miss, but the hint can still come across as subtle— that’s not easy for a writer to do. Practically impossible, I’d say, judging from how many times I’ve seen modern authors pull it off. Dahl makes it look easy.
Gerald Kersh, Busto Is A Ghost, Too Mean To Give Us A Fright! 3552
Kersh is a forgotten master; his stories are one of the great pleasures available in English. This story is another one about Busto’s rooming house, and it’s a very special story. When I read it first, years ago, I didn’t have a dog; I liked the story, but I don’t recall it moving me particularly. Now I do— have a dog, I mean— and Kersh must have somehow rewritten it from beyond the grave, in the intervening years.
This story about the hardboiled Busto and his injured dog is as good as any writing on the subject of love that I’ve ever seen. I came close to crying, listening to an audio version of it while I was out walking my dog. I find that I can’t recommend that particular example of multi-tasking to you.
Edgar Allan Poe, Hop-Frog 3635
As a kid, I found a thick volume of Poe somewhere, and I recall this story really giving me the creeps. Many Poe stories and poems are more famous, but this one rattled me then and rattles me now; I’m sure it changed my middle school brain chemistry.
Poe’s awfully good on the subject of revenge; when a Poe character starts contemplating revenge, he’s going to go through with it. And you’re going to sit there and watch.
Frank O’Connor, The Cornet Player Who Betrayed Ireland 3652
I got interested in the great Irish writer when my friend recommended his classic survey about short fiction. Nobody reads that book much anymore, mainly because it’s impossible to find at any price you’d accept, unless you’re crazy.
But his short fiction is the goods. This story is an amusing and touching tale about the narrator’s youth. The childish political passion he shared with his fellows is recollected decades later with wry irony; the tone is funny and sad, which is probably a blend less difficult to get into a short story than into a novel. But it is not exactly easy, on any terrain or in any weather.
Walter De La Mare, The Village Of Old Age 3664
This unsettling little tale about age, time, and death never even made it into one of De La Mare’s story collections. He’s probably best known for his poetry, when he’s known at all by the living, but his genteel brand of macabre story can really get under your skin. This isn’t one of his best, but it’s still excellent. I’d be surprised if a bad De La Mare story ever turns up. His prose is almost as good as Evelyn Waugh’s. The only thing stopping him from being on Waugh’s level is he’s not mean enough. He’s often cruel, but it’s not exactly the same thing.
ADD: Tom Alderson, Tim’s Back Home, 3700
Powerful story, narrated by a younger brother, about his older brother’s mental collapse. His brilliant but socially detached brother Tim returns from college, in no shape to go back to school or even back to normal home life.
Showing events through the eyes of a kid is an effective device in fiction, and the narrator’s lack of understanding and absence from the physical setting of much of the drama gives us two stories in a sense. We get the story of what’s happening to Tim, and their parents, and the more upfront story of the narrator’s confused reaction to his family’s behavior. It’s all the more poignant and unsettling because the parents are scarcely less confused than the narrator.
William Faulkner, A Rose For Emily 3703
Faulkner wasn’t by nature a short story writer. He liked to run long, and his work often feels longer than it is. But there’s no better short story by any American writer than this one, and it’s very tight indeed. Faulkner knew this story would work better without so much of his usual cornfield and Spanish moss festoonery, but he managed to pack a lot of Faulknerism into a short running time.
If you haven’t read any Faulkner for a while, you probably recall the verbosity more than the fiendishly concise endings. This ending can’t be beat.
Faulkner was experimental, and taxing, but I suspect he heard a lot of grizzled southerners telling a lot of grizzled yarns, and as modernistic as he was, he captured a lot of his world and time in his best work. This is another one that ought to be considered required reading.
Naguib Mahfouz, Room No. 12 3712
Another Nobelist, and another master of straight fiction who was equally adept at weird fantasy. He’s known for his novels, but his short work is wonderful. This is one of those eerie tales where you never quite know what is up til the end. I suppose it’s an allegory of some sort, but don’t let that worry you. His literary chops are considerable, but you read him because you can’t stop.
If this is “weird fiction”— and I think it is— it’s as good as that can be. He’s inventive, he’s got great atmosphere control, it’s all there.
I recall bluegrass fiddler Eddie Stubbs once admitting to having been classically trained, and adding, “but it didn’t hurt my fiddlin’ none.”
Jorge Luis Borges, Garden Of Forking Paths 3745
This is a key Borges item— an old-fashioned spy story that cooks along at a high boil like his hero Robert Louis Stevenson, while also giving us a big dose of his addiction to geometry and high-strung allusion. For the Borgesian reader, this is a classic on par with the better-known stories in this batch.
The train crept along gently, amid ash trees. It slowed down and stopped, almost in the middle of a field. No one called the name of a station. “Ashgrove?” I asked some children on the platform. “Ashgrove,” they replied. I got out. A lamp lit the platform, but the children's faces remained in a shadow. One of them asked me: “Are you going to Dr. Stephen Albert's house?” Without waiting for my answer, another said: “The house is a good distance away but you won't get lost if you take the road to the left and bear to the left at every crossroad.” I threw them a coin (my last), went down some stone steps and started along a deserted road. At a slight incline, the road ran downhill. It was a plain dirt way, and overhead the branches of trees intermingled, while a round moon hung low in the sky as if to keep me company.
Percival Everett, House 3752
Percival is getting a lot of attention at the moment for the recent film they made from his book “Erasure.” I liked the movie, although some writers I like did not; whatever the correct response to the film may be, a quick look at the novel revealed that it was far more complex and experimental than the film adaptation. I’ve bought some more of his work and it all looks good.
This story about mental illness and an institution that deals with it is gritty but not gratuitous, sensitive without being soft. I’m not sure yet what sort of writer Percival is, but if he were sitting here with me I’d ask him a bunch of questions. He obviously knows what the hell he’s doing. He’s known to some degree for experimentalism, but this story is plain spoken and deft. I’ll have more to say on him later.
Jon Padgett, Murmurs Of A Voice Foreknown 3784
Jon is one of our best living horror/weird fiction writers. He’s an acolyte of Thomas Ligotti, but in the same exalted way that De Maupassant was an acolyte of Flaubert. This tale about a kid being terrorized by his older brother is as creepy as Padgett’s creepiest material, but it’s also mostly true— it’s a highly disturbing modern classic.
ADD Jack Ketchum, The Box 3848
Ketchum’s name came to me when I was thinking— as I often do— about Evelyn Waugh’s claim that he regarded writing as an exercise in the use of language. (He was impatient with an interviewer, and pushing back against the implication that writing was “an investigation of character.”)
I’m not here to litigate that question today, but it did occur to me that this business of writing being primarily— or only— about language seems to rankle some writers to the point where they feel the need to pretend that genre writers know better, genre writers aren’t fussy and pretentious about words, and so forth.
Ketchum seems a fine example to illustrate my objection to such witless tribal logic.
Ketchum is a horror writer, and he falls generally on the side of horror I like less, the side with harsh violence. Ketchum lifts up the sheet and makes you look at whatever was covered up. So, I’m a genre aficionado, and I read him even though he’s never going to be one of my favorites.
But there’s an inescapable aspect to his writing, and this is why I see from my highlights that I’ve read six of his stories. I have writers that I talk and think about a lot, and I’ve read fewer than six of their stories. It’s always of their use of language.
But that doesn’t have to mean flowery, ostentatious language. It means language that creates a voice and an atmosphere, and that atmosphere doesn’t have to be anything approaching the baroque or the hothouse poetic. Just as supposed over-writers like Henry James can be ruthlessly efficient despite the sentences that wind like ill-lit staircases, a meat-and-potatoes guy like Ketchum can make me feel something with his no-nonsense approach.
This story reminds me of Richard Matheson, but it’s even bleaker somehow. I did not expect the ending this morning, even though I had read the story before. Very frightening story, and no gore or viscera needed. It’s partly the story idea, of course, but if Ketchum didn’t know how to use language, the story would not have worked. I wish I’d had the opportunity to chat with Ketchum about his prose; I suspect it would have been more profitable than a chat with Waugh. Certainly more pleasant.
W.W. Jacobs, The Monkey’s Paw 3956
These days I would guess that most people have heard of this story but haven’t read it. I recommend reading it; even if you know the basic plot already, it’s fun to read. Judged as a piece of writing, it is very fine, but judged as a story, it’s indispensable to world culture. It’s hard to believe it was actually written down by a person one day; it feels like it’s part of oral tradition.
Edgar Allan Poe, The Black Cat 3981
Another famous classic story from Poe, who’s had several clustering in the 2-4K area. I think the lesson there is obvious; Poe knew this length was the sweet spot for horrifying stories, especially if you want them to be read by a general audience.
John Collier, Mademoiselle Kiki 3995
Read this excerpt carefully.
Beyond the rack comes the last foot or so of the counter, and it is here that Kiki sleeps the whole day through. Kiki is a cat in her middle years, but looking rather older owing to the ravages of a passionate temperament. Had the cat world its Kinsey, he could tell us some remarkable things. For example, there are certain spells in the life of the female of that species when she becomes more than ordinarily interested in the conversation of the opposite sex. These spells are very variable both in their frequency and their duration. Sometimes they occur twice in the year, sometimes thrice, and, in the ardent South, instances have been known of the manifestation recurring as often as four or five times. Kiki, though no prude, would have disdained such intemperance. In her case, the condition prevailed only once in every year. It must be admitted, however, that it lasted, except in leap years, for three hundred and sixty-five days.
Okay, it’s time for a little housekeeping.
DISCLAIMER about the lopsided representation of genre, gender, culture, etc.—
I’ve got plenty of good short stories kicking around in my archive that didn’t make it into the survey. This means that women and science fiction— to mention just two obvious examples— are underrepresented here. If readers like reading these posts, I can keep doing new batches to balance out these holes a bit. It’s not my goal to achieve total balance, but I’m happy to get recommendations that will help me get more variety in the survey.
One yawning crevice is the lack of Black American writers. I’ve looked at a few historical overview collections that look great, but I’m not seeing any yet on kindle. It’s harder for me to use physical books for this project, but I’ll keep looking. Stay tuned.
I just downloaded a couple Percival Everett collections, and some short fiction by Walter Mosley, so that will kick the can down the road for a minute. Now that Amazon knows I like to read short stories written by Black men, Kindle will probably start recommending stuff. And writer DuVay Knox (Pimpfucius) suggested an author or two, I just have to find where I put those books.
If you have a genre or a gender or cultural box you’d like to see more of here, please comment! Justin has suggested some Harlan Ellison stories, so look for those in later batches.
A few of these I love (ie my top top, like Borges) and many I haven’t read. So...excited to dive in!like how Lou Reed comes up in the best connections. I’ve saved this to really hunt down the rest later. Any you would recommend for high school students especially? I’m working on some major curriculum changes at the next place I’ll be working. Thanks Karl!
Thanks for including James Purdy, a personal favorite.