Classic Short Stories

There is a particular fate that befalls certain works of literature: they become so thoroughly known that they no longer need to be read. 

The story enters the culture as a reference, a shorthand, a set of recognisable coordinates — and the actual text, with its specific language and atmosphere and irreducible strangeness, is quietly left behind. 

This is not obscurity. It is something more insidious. The story survives, but in a form so reduced that the original can no longer be heard inside it.

The twelve stories in this collection have suffered this fate almost without exception.

Ask anyone what happens in The Monkey’s Paw and they will tell you: wishes go wrong, be careful what you ask for, fate cannot be cheated. Ask anyone about The Tell-Tale Heart and they will give you: a murderer, a heartbeat, guilt made audible. The vampire, the haunted signal box, the screaming skull — each has been absorbed into cultural shorthand so completely that the experience of reading them has been largely replaced by the experience of already knowing them.

What the shorthand loses is everything.