A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
The readership the story was written for.
A father follows his young son into a shop where stage tricks become genuine magic and every doorway leads deeper from ordinary London.
A stubborn skeptic discovers that any command he truly wills becomes real, though precision is not among his gifts.
After his rival dies, a celebrated entomologist discovers a moth no one else can see—and cannot stop trying to catch it.
A physiologist’s new stimulant speeds thought and movement so radically that the outside world seems frozen in time.
A shy novice becomes a theater critic and finds the stage’s poses and speeches steadily replacing his own personality.
A grieving prince builds an ever more magnificent monument to his lost queen, refining it until devotion and art become hard to separate.
A chemistry accident sends an ordinary schoolmaster into a shadow world that overlaps the lives of everyone he knew.
A timid shopkeeper eats a strange mushroom after a domestic quarrel and returns home with a violent idea of merriment.
A confident skeptic spends the night in a notorious room, armed with candles and reason against its dark reputation.
A laboratory accident blinds Davidson to London and replaces it with a vivid view of a remote island that may be more than hallucination.
A seaside walker discovers that unfamiliar deep-sea creatures have reached the English coast—and have developed a taste for human prey.
A new star grows brighter each night, and one mathematician realizes that its path will bring catastrophe to Earth.
A nervous visitor steals a scientist’s deadliest culture and races across London with catastrophe—and fame—on his mind.
A London psychical researcher leaves his body during an experiment—and returns to find it occupied by something else.
A confident clubman claims he helped a hapless ghost vanish, then agrees to demonstrate the spirit’s strange hand gestures.
A poor medical student accepts an old philosopher’s inheritance offer and wakes to find that far more than a name has changed hands.
A mediocre painter watches his portrait acquire a devilish expression—and then hears the canvas criticize his art.
Two exhausted adventurers follow a stolen treasure map into a tropical forest, certain that murder has put a fortune within reach.
Over whisky, a taxidermist boasts that preserving nature is only the beginning of his art—and explains how easily collectors can be fooled.
An obese clubman demands an old family remedy for losing weight, only to discover how literally the recipe works.
Three horsemen pursuing a fleeing woman enter a silent valley where the wind carries vast webs alive with spiders.
Confined to a couch, an invalid watches a distant manhunt as entertainment until the chase crosses the river and comes to his window.
A man awaiting surgery confronts death, consciousness, and the scale of the universe while his doctors work.
A self-proclaimed 228-year-old gentleman recalls evenings with Samuel Johnson, Boswell, and their sharp-tongued London circle.
