A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How quickly the story moves.
A sighted mountaineer falls into an isolated valley where blindness is universal—and learns that his advantage has no accepted meaning.
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 successful politician confides that a green door has offered him glimpses of a lost garden of perfect happiness throughout his life.
A Brazilian gunboat sent against a plague of giant ants discovers an organized enemy capable of challenging human rule of the Amazon.
A quiet orchid collector longs for one remarkable event, then a mysterious plant from the tropics begins to bloom in his greenhouse.
A housemaid watches her respectable fiancé rise in the world—and begin to treat their long engagement as something beneath him.
An abused laborer in a roaring power station begins to worship the largest dynamo as a god capable of judging his brutal supervisor.
A shabby barroom storyteller explains how he was promised a fortune by an unread author—and why he never received it.
A father follows his young son into a shop where stage tricks become genuine magic and every doorway leads deeper from ordinary London.
After his rival dies, a celebrated entomologist discovers a moth no one else can see—and cannot stop trying to catch it.
A grieving prince builds an ever more magnificent monument to his lost queen, refining it until devotion and art become hard to separate.
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 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.
Two exhausted adventurers follow a stolen treasure map into a tropical forest, certain that murder has put a fortune within reach.
Confined to a couch, an invalid watches a distant manhunt as entertainment until the chase crosses the river and comes to his window.
A young asylum doctor tests a homemade telepathic device on a violent sleepwalker whose dreams describe worlds far beyond Earth.
A struggling writer befriends a reclusive doctor who can survive only in a refrigerated room, then learns why the cold is essential.
Escaping a wartime prison ship, a sailor wakes stranded on a newly risen ocean floor marked by signs of an ancient marine civilization.
A young scholar traces his family's troubled history from a decaying English estate to a ruined city deep in the Congo.
A homesick poet follows an eighteenth-century stranger through hidden New York streets to a house erased from modern maps.
An art critic visits a missing painter's secret studio and learns why his monsters look more convincing than ordinary imagination can explain.
