The Terrible Old Man by H. P. Lovecraft. It was the design of Angelo Ricci and Joe Czanek and Manuel Silva to call on the Terrible Old Man.
This old man dwells all alone in a very ancient house on Water Street near the sea, and is reputed to be both exceedingly rich and exceedingly feeble; which forms a situation very attractive to men of the profession of Messrs. Ricci, Czanek, and Silva, for that profession was nothing less dignified than robbery. The inhabitants of Kingsport say and think many things about the Terrible Old Man which generally keep him safe from the attention of gentlemen like Mr. Ricci and his colleagues, despite the almost certain fact that he hides a fortune of indefinite magnitude somewhere about his musty and venerable abode.
He is, in truth, a very strange person, believed to have been a captain of East India clipper ships in his day; so old that no one can remember when he was young, and so taciturn that few know his real name. "The Outsider" by H. P. Lovecraft. Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.
Wretched is he who looks back upon lone hours in vast and dismal chambers with brown hangings and maddening rows of antique books, or upon awed watches in twilight groves of grotesque, gigantic, and vine-encumbered trees that silently wave twisted branches far aloft. Such a lot the gods gave to me—to me, the dazed, the disappointed; the barren, the broken. And yet I am strangely content, and cling desperately to those sere memories, when my mind momentarily threatens to reach beyond to the other. I know not where I was born, save that the castle was infinitely old and infinitely horrible; full of dark passages and having high ceilings where the eye could find only cobwebs and shadows.
The Hound by H. P. Lovecraft. In my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare whirring and flapping, and a faint distant baying as of some gigantic hound.
It is not dream - it is not, I fear, even madness - for too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts. St John is a mangled corpse; I alone know why, and such is my knowledge that I am about to blow out my brains for fear I shall be mangled in the same way. Down unlit and illimitable corridors of eldrith phantasy sweeps the black, shapeless Nemesis that drives me to self-annihilation. The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe. By Edgar Allan Poe(published 1845) FOR the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief.
Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not -- and very surely do I not dream. But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul. The Moonlit Road by Ambrose Bierce. The Moonlit Road 1.
Statement of Joel Hetman, Jr. I am the most unfortunate of men. The Lottery. By Shirley Jackson Shirley Jackson's short story The Lottery was published in 1948 and is not in the public domain.
Accordingly, we are prohibited from presenting the full text here as part of our short story collections, but here is a short summary of the story, followed by some commentary and explanations. It is important to have some historical context to understand this story and the negative reaction that it generated when it was published in the June 26, 1948 issue of The New Yorker.