A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
Where does the story take place?
A lonely woman adopts an orphan for love, then begins to fear the silent young man growing up inside her house.
A sheltered young wife befriends the woman named in an anonymous warning about her husband—and trusts them both.
A late-night walk with a nervous pedlar leads a young oarsman into a poor household where each sound suggests the wrong kind of danger.
A stranger’s watchful presence unsettles a fisherman’s household until his identity forces the family to reconsider every bond within it.
A marquise arrives laughing with a secret: she has chosen a direct revenge on her jealous, abusive husband.
A bored baroness copies a window signal she sees across the street and discovers that curiosity can be taken as a business offer.
A duel between two dragoons reveals the secret arrangement of a widow known for piety and strict respectability.
A smug husband decides he would recognize any sign of adultery and devises a test that may prove more than he wants to know.
A miserly woman refuses to replace her husband’s ruined umbrella—until an insurance policy suggests a way to avoid paying.
A young man explains how his mother’s final testament exposed the truth behind a brutal country household.
A beautiful countess rebels against the husband who has used pregnancy to control her, choosing a revenge designed to poison his certainty.
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 bedridden tavern keeper’s furious wife finds an outrageous way to make him useful.
A failing shopkeeper finally tells his wife they face ruin, just as a family catastrophe offers an answer neither can admit wanting.
A vain minor poet mistakes his hunger for inspiration for a grand passion when a young admirer takes his rhetoric seriously.
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.
A timid shopkeeper eats a strange mushroom after a domestic quarrel and returns home with a violent idea of merriment.
A poor medical student accepts an old philosopher’s inheritance offer and wakes to find that far more than a name has changed hands.
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 struggling writer befriends a reclusive doctor who can survive only in a refrigerated room, then learns why the cold is essential.
Caught in a storm, a genealogist takes shelter in an isolated New England farmhouse whose ancient owner studies a gruesome engraving.
A doctor and his nephew investigate a Providence house where generations of residents have weakened, gone mad, or died.
