A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
Recurring elements in the story’s premise.
A stranger at a desert campfire tells how four prospectors were trapped in a cave thirty years earlier.
On Easter morning, a newly married farmer passes a sick soldier on the road and cannot quiet his conscience afterward.
A mild bookkeeper’s quiet tour of the Solar System turns him into an asteroid-town marshal with an alien beast for backup.
A cook who considers himself a great philosopher receives a visit from the Devil and tries to bargain away his soul.
A drunk skeptic mocks reports of strange accidents, then meets the official responsible for making unlikely events happen.
A perfectly ordered Dutch borough measures life by clocks and cabbages until a strange fiddler crosses the surrounding hills.
At a desolate tarn, a boatman shows a traveler the blood-red cross marking where the Wandering Jew supposedly died.
A confirmed bachelor plans to marry a near stranger because one empty armchair has made solitude unbearable.
A skeptical magistrate recounts an unsolved Corsican murder involving a secretive Englishman and a chained human hand.
A respected village priest receives a ragged visitor whose face and faded photograph reopen the betrayal that drove him into the Church.
A solitary collector watches every object in his beloved house walk away into the night—and no explanation can make the sight less real.
A young schoolmaster receives a golden fruit said to grant perfect knowledge, just as he begins his respectable new career.
A ragged stranger claims to carry a fortune in man-made diamonds, but every proof of his success has made him look more like a criminal.
A homesick poet follows an eighteenth-century stranger through hidden New York streets to a house erased from modern maps.
A sculptor and a brilliant stranger use drugs to cross the boundaries of sleep until one reaches a place neither can safely revisit.
A traveling showman arrives with electrical marvels and visions that draw a restless city toward a night of collective terror.
When an orphan’s kitten vanishes in Ulthar, every cat in the village leaves home for the same night.
A man follows a family summons to a silent New England town, where a Christmas gathering leads beneath the local church.
A ruthless U-boat commander loses control of his submarine and drifts toward ruins on the Atlantic floor.
A lonely lighthouse keeper boards a white ship under the full moon and sails through dreamlike lands of beauty, mystery, and danger.
A condemned hunter is sent two centuries into the past to kill a religious founder, armed only with a gun and the target’s skull.
Impoverished in Tang-dynasty Loyang, Tu Tzuchun is offered a second fortune by an enigmatic old man—but begins to want something different.
A gangly schoolmaster courts a farmer’s daughter in a drowsy Hudson Valley town haunted by a headless horseman.
23 stories
