Outstanding short stories

I've been liking short stories lately. Perfectly built small objects isolating and exploring a theme or feeling. I like them dense and explosive; they can burst open with one sustained mood or idea in a way that longer things can't. But I also like them clear and precise, finely crafted. What are people's favorites? Some of mine, in roughly descending order:

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (Borges)
The Metamorphosis (Kafka)
First Love (Beckett)
The Crocodike (Dostoyevsky)
The Double (Dostoyevsky)
Why Don't You Dance? (Carver)
Gazebo (Carver)
The Soldier and Death (Minghella version)
Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (Borges)
The Rats in the Walls (Lovecraft)
The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D (Ballard)
The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race (Ballard)
The Balloon (Barthelme)
Gimpel the Fool (Singer)
The Judgement (Kafka)
The Tell-Tale Heart (Poe)
Ligeia (Poe)
Rumpelstiltskin (Brothers Grimm)
I and My Chimney (Melville)

My five favorites are probably

"To Catch a Fire," London
"The Fall of the House of Usher," Poe
"All the King's Horses," Vonnegut
"In the Hills, the Cities," Barker
"The Country of the Blind," Wells

With "The Music of Erich Zann" on the bench ready to tag in.

I don't remember titles of individual stories as much as I do collections.

Dusk and Other Stories by James Salter is pretty freaking great.
Hot Water Music by Bukowski.
The Complete Stories of John Cheever.

Some favorites that sprang to my mind:

"The Dead" (Joyce)
“What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” (Carver)
“The Angel Esmeralda” (DeLillo)
“Yellow” (Don Lee)
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (Irving)
“Editha” (Howells)
“The Outcasts of Poker Flat” (Harte)
"Sonny's Blues" (Baldwin)
“The Killers” (Hemingway)
“Brave We Are” (Naqvi)
“A Good Fall” (Jin)
“Christ in Concrete” (di Donato)
“The White Heron” (Jewett)
“Paper Lantern” (Dybek)
“That Evening Sun” (Faulkner)
“Roman Fever” (Wharton)
“Desiree’s Baby” (Chopin)
“Defender of the Faith” (Roth)
“Until Gwen” (Lehane)
“Evidence” (Asimov)
“The Gernsback Continuum” (Gibson)

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Originally Posted by Benny Profane

The Complete Stories of John Cheever.

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I just read The Swimmer today. Good stuff.

"The Repairer of Reputations," by Robert W. Chambers - the only horror story I've ever read that actually scared me. It feels dangerous, like something that should NOT be read, which is fitting when considering the greater subject matter. It depicts madness and hysteria in a tangible manner, and is utterly haunting.

I consider it a failure of all of my lit classes in high school and college that this was not taught, that I was not led to discover and study this story as the ultimate way in which to write horror of any kind.

Audio version
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bXbbYjuet4

"The People of the Pit," by A. Merritt. Pretty much ground zero for all Lovecraftian horror. This is where it all began.

"Disappearing Act," by Alfred Bester - a premier example of short science fiction.

"Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan," "The Secret History of World War III," "Index," "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race," and "Chronopolis," by JG Ballard - I consider Ballard a master of the short story, and here are some excellent examples.

"The Microcosmic God," "If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?" "Saucer of Loneliness," and "Bianca's Hands," by Theodore Sturgeon.

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Originally Posted by Melville

The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race (Ballard)

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Holy shit. Is this the first time you and I have agreed on anything?

I'm shocked! Especially since it comes in the form of Ballard. The more I love something, the more you seem to despise it. And man, Ballard doesn't seem like your kind of author at all!

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Originally Posted by D_Davis

Holy shit. Is this the first time you and I have agreed on anything?

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Ha. It's been known to happen on occasion. More recently than Ballard, I read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and thought it was great. I don't remember if you're a fan of that one, but I remember you enthusing about Muriel Spark in general. I'm interested in checking out that Chambers story you mentioned.

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I'm shocked! Especially since it comes in the form of Ballard. The more I love something, the more you seem to despise it. And man, Ballard doesn't seem like your kind of author at all!

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Both Vermillion Sands and The Atrocity Exhibition are great. The former, though a bit too repetitive, creates a terrifically memorable setting with an exquisite balance of melancholy and magic, long-faded nostalgias, plastic dreams and death wishes. That's the kind of thing that fantasy and sci-fi stories usually don't do enough of (in my limited experience with the genres): create and explore mood and feeling through their fantastical settings. I liked Atrocity Exhibition even more. It's like a compelling explosion of geometrized sex. It reforms reality into new shapes.

I wasn't so keen on the other stories I read by him, but there were a few others I liked, particularly The Drowned Giant.

I've been meaning to read some Borges for sometime now, so I should get on that.

Is there a particular collection you'd recommend? I have no idea where to even start.

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Originally Posted by D_Davis

I've been meaning to read some Borges for sometime now, so I should get on that.

Is there a particular collection you'd recommend? I have no idea where to even start.

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Fictions is by far his best, I think. Both the Borges stories listed in my original post are in it. It's the only thing I've read that I'd describe as mind-blowing. He has an incredible way of crystallizing fundamental ideas about reality, examining their facets, and then turning them inside out.

I also loved The Aleph. It and Fictions are his most conceptual. His earlier stuff is more twists on genres. His later stuff started to feel a bit meandering to me; more personal, maybe, but less interesting.

But you might as well go for the whole deal: http://www.amazon.com/Collected-Fict.../dp/0140286802 It's got everything, probably for a similar price as any individual collection. It's also conveniently organized according to the individual collections, so you can go right to reading whichever of them you want.

Cool, thanks. Ballard was often compared to Borges, as were many of the other SF authors I like. So I owe it to myself and the man to investigate.

Ordered that giant Borges collection.

Also, a couple to add:

"The Small Assassin," "The Emissary," and The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury.

Another collection - Callahan's Crosstime Saloon, by Spider Robinson.

"The Night they Missed the Horror Show," "Drive-In Date," "Steppin' Out, Summer 68," by Joe R. Lansdale.

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Originally Posted by Melville

Ha. It's been known to happen on occasion. More recently than Ballard, I read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and thought it was great. I don't remember if you're a fan of that one, but I remember you enthusing about Muriel Spark in general. I'm interested in checking out that Chambers story you mentioned.

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I LOVE The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. One of my all-time favorites.

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Originally Posted by D_Davis

I LOVE The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. One of my all-time favorites.

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Nice. I was surprised how much I liked it. I loved the recurring image of the girl in the nunnery pressing her face against the window grate.


A few stories I forgot:

The Lecture Tour (Hamsun)
Zachaeus (Hamsun)
The Thought (Andreyev)
The Red Laugh (Andreyev) <- a hallucinatory vision of the horrors of war. Pretty sure some people on here would like it.

"Orange is for Anguish, Blue for Insanity," by David Morrell. A fucking MASTERPIECE of weird fiction. Just brilliant. By, yes, the author of First Blood.

"The Drunkard's Dream," by Sheridan Le Fanu. Another example of top-notch, classic, pre-Lovecraftian weird fiction.

The Gods of Pegana, (collection of short, 1-2 page stories detailing the pantheon of a fantastic world) by Lord Dunsany. Probably one of the most important works of fantasy literature ever written. Utterly poetic, haunting, and original. One of the first examples of pure world building. Dunsany does in about 80 pages what Jordan and Martin can't do in a billion. The godfather of all modern fantasy.

"The Frolic," by Thomas Ligotti - a story that actually gave me nightmares.

Anyone even remotely into weird fiction and horror should own this book:

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8...ream_Nightmare

One of the all-time greats. So many amazing stories.

The Drunkard’s Dream by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
The Dream Woman by Wilkie Collins
A Dream of Red Hands by Bram Stoker
The Death of Halpin Frayser by Ambrose Bierce
The Yellow Sign by Robert W. Chambers
The Room in the Tower by E. F. Benson
Three Lines of Old French by A. Merritt
Beyond the Door by J. Paul Suter
The Shadows by Henry S. Whitehead
The Black Stone by Robert E. Howard
Ubbo-Sathla by Clark Ashton Smith
The Watcher in the Green Room by Hugh B. Cave
The Lady in Gray by Donald Wandrei
Scarlet Dream by C. L. Moore
The Dreams in the Witch-House by H. P. Lovecraft
The Isle of the Sleeper by Edmond Hamilton
Prescience by Nelson S. Bond
The Dreams of Albert Moreland by Fritz Leiber, Jr.
The Unspeakable Betrothal by Robert Bloch
Lover, When You’re Near Me by Richard Matheson
Perchance to Dream by Charles Beaumont
The River of Night’s Dreaming by Karl Edward Wagner
The Depths by Ramsey Campbell
Dream of a Mannikin by Thomas Ligotti
Never Visit Venice by Robert Aickman
The Dream of the Wolf by Scott Bradfield
The Last and Dreadful Hour by Charles L. Grant
Dream Baby by Bruce McAllister
The Heart’s Desire by Chet Williamson
In the Flesh by Clive Barker


The Robert E. Howard story is incredible. I even like the Ramsey Campbell story here, and I hate most of his stuff.

I read "The Rats in the Walls" last night. Again, I'm completely frustrated by Lovecraft. He is so poor at building tension. He's a master at breaking tension. When comparing something like that story with "The Tell-Tale Heart" it's embarrassing how much more engrossing and tense Poe's story is from the very start. Lovecraft starts to build tension, and then interrupts it with asides, or drags out the tension to a point where it loses impact. Take for instance the moment when they are descending into the hidden underground in "Rats." On two separate occasions Lovecraft has our narrator tell the reader, "You won't believe what we saw in front of us. Seriously, you won't believe it. If we weren't so prepared for the craziness that hit our eyeballs, we would have died. Seriously, Frank feinted when he saw it, and he's a damn doctor. That's how fucking disturbing this sight was." It's the perfect example of needlessly stringing out a moment to the point where tension gives over to frustration, pulling me out of the narrative.

I'm going to read "Cthulu," "Dunwich," and "Innsmouth" because I want to give him a fair shot, but at this point I think he's just not for me.

I'm not a big fan of Lovecraft, and I love weird fiction.

At the Mountains of Madness is probably his best, and even that one is plagued with things that bug me about Lovecraft.

I'd say give "Cthulhu," "The Colour Out of Space," and "The Music of Erich Zann" a try before you do "Dunwich" or "Innsmouth." But it might not matter either way, if you're not digging on "Rats."

And it's a known fact in this sub-fora that D_Davis is a Lovecraft playa hayta.

I got the Borges book - Collected Fictions.

Looking forward to finally having read some of this author's stories.

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Originally Posted by Melville

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (Borges)

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So this story checks off just about every box: great prose, secret societies, stories about stories, mythology, mysticism, a great sense of wonder and mystery, etc.

Very, very good.

It's a wonderful mix of Eco, Robert Anton Wilson, Arturo Perez, Cisco, and weird fiction. Loved it.

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Originally Posted by D_Davis

So this story checks off just about every box: great prose, secret societies, stories about stories, mythology, mysticism, a great sense of wonder and mystery, etc.

Very, very good.

It's a wonderful mix of Eco, Robert Anton Wilson, Arturo Perez, Cisco, and weird fiction. Loved it.

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Nice.

We definitely disagree on Lovecraft, though. At the Mountains of Madness is the only thing I've not liked by him. By spending so much time on the taxonomy and physiology of things, it robs them of all their horror. Everything is so overly explained, there's nothing left of the unknown in it. Lovecraft's best stories hint at unknown horrors in forgotten places and murky pasts. In general, I prefer Lovecraft's more horror-based stories to the more sci-fi-based ones.

I can't remember The Rats in the Walls well enough to respond to KF's reason for disliking it—except to say I found those rats pretty horrifying. To say nothing of the fungus men.