Top Ten Tuesday is a feature/weekly meme created and hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.
This week’s topic is Halloween related freebie. I love a scary tale. Here are five of my favourite scary short stories. They’re all very different from
1. “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson begins in summer, in a small village, “in the square, between the post office and the bank” and ends in much the same place and time. Everything is changed, though, especially the reader. When it was initially published in the issue of June 26, 1948 of The New Yorker, readers cancelled their subscriptions in droves. They were confused or angry. They wrote letters. Here [link contains spoilers] is a very interesting article about those letters, written by Ruth Franklin, who recently wrote a Shirley Jackson biography, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. Listen to A.M. Homes discuss and read “The Lottery” for The New Yorker fiction podcast or listen to a full cast dramatization from Ecoustic Alchemy.
2. “Click-Clack the Rattlebag” by Neil Gaiman is a very scary story about the appeal of stories that are “just a little bit scary.” Read it here or watch Neil Gaiman read it at the New York Public Library.