"All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered."
"The Lifted Veil" is an 1859 Victorian horror and science fiction novella written by George Eliot. It originally appeared anonymously in the periodical Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, on July 1859, and she added her name when it was published alongside her short story "Brother Jacob" in...
Herman Melville needs no introductions, and "The Bell-Tower" is one of his darker short stories, first published in August 1855 in Putnam's Monthly, and later included in his collection The Piazza Tales (1856). Maybe this'll be the year I get around to reading Moby...
“A Tropical Horror” is a 1905 short story by William Hope Hodgson and one of his earliest published fictions. It first appeared in The Grand Magazine of June 1905, and it is Hodgson’s second published story, but his first sea‑based horror tale. The maritime settings...
“Lot No. 249” is a short story by Arthur Conan Doyle, first published in Harper’s Monthly Magazine in September 1892 and later included in the collection Round the Red Lamp (1894). It is one of the foundational modern “revenant mummy” stories, if you're a fan...
"Bal Macabre" (1908) is one of Gustav Meyrink’s most striking occult short stories: a hallucinatory, symbol-laden tale set in a decadent nightclub that turns into a vision of death, poison, and a secret society of the “apparently dead.” You might know the guy for The...
Honoré de Balzac’s “The Red Inn” (L’Auberge rouge) is a short story first published in 1831 and later included among the Études philosophiques of La Comédie humaine. It's a story-within-the-story. I'm not particularly fond of Balzac, but maybe you'll enjoy it. In I know not what...
Amelia Edwards’ “The Engineer” is a short story first published in 1866 as part of Mugby Junction, a collaborative Christmas volume edited by Charles Dickens for his magazine All the Year Round. It was later reissued under the title "An Engineer’s Story" (1873). If you...
“The Hollow of the Three Hills” is one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s earliest tales and is generally regarded as his first published short story. It appeared anonymously in The Salem Gazette on November 12, 1830, and was later collected in Twice-Told Tales (1837). In those strange old...
Chapter V. Of all the persons who had been present, in any capacity, at the Marquis Melani's ball, the earliest riser on the morning after it was Nanina. The agitation produced by the strange events in which she had been concerned destroyed the very idea of sleep....
Continues from yesterday...
