A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the prose reads.
An orphan crosses the country and comes back to the town where his mother is buried.
A shopkeeper keeps selling goods after his funeral, and the whole village comes to see him.
A man hears a familiar tapping in a room where no one else can be.
A physician tests a friend’s fear of an inherited watch and sees how serious it is.
At a solemn funeral, the widow looks once more through the coffin glass and screams.
Lost in a California forest, Halpin Frayser dreams of a deadly encounter with someone he knows.
An isolated house rumored to hide a fortune draws visitors after its secretive owner dies.
Two men agree to fight with knives in a house said to be haunted.
A mother is murdered, a father vanishes, and three accounts tell different parts of what happened.
Alone in a deserted mining camp, Hiram Beeson waits each night for a visitor from beneath his floor.
A man meets a hypnotist he distrusts, then sees his fiancée arrive in town without warning.
A Union soldier returns to the Tennessee home he left after a bitter family split.
After a private is executed for striking an officer, a battlefield roll call receives an answer no one expects.
An eloquent abbot leaves his desert monastery to condemn the city’s sins, then discovers how seductive a warning can become.
A Norwegian fisherman explains how careful observation saved him when a hurricane swept his boat into the Maelström.
Psyche Zenobia climbs an Edinburgh steeple in search of material for a sensation article and puts her head through a clock face.
During the Roman siege of Jerusalem, three temple officials pay the soldiers below for animals to use in sacrifice.
A sick young man enters the Virginia mountains and returns with a precise memory of dying in another century.
A reclusive scholar's fixation on his cousin's teeth grows stronger as illness changes her body and mind.
A cook who considers himself a great philosopher receives a visit from the Devil and tries to bargain away his soul.
A mock scientific essay defines the perfect swindler and catalogs the small cons that make fraud look respectable.
After promising his dying cousin that he will never love again, a grieving man leaves their hidden valley and faces a second love.
A captive court jester must design one more masquerade for the king who treats him and his friend as property.
An ambitious literary society secretary asks a famous editor to teach her the formula for a fashionable tale of extreme sensation.
