Short Fiction
Leonid Andreyev (1871–1919), 1916
Feverish stories from the edge of sanity: a masked man, a resurrected Lazarus, soldiers in a red haze, and ordinary people discovering how thin the skin of civilization is. These stories move with a feverish, gothic unease, their calm prose tightening around madness, dread and ordinary people pushed past their limits.
Feels like dread, unease and melancholy. About madness, death and war.
Who it’s for
You may like these if you enjoy gothic short fiction that stays close to panic, courts, executions and the thin edge of sanity. The mood is relentlessly bleak and some stories are more feverish tableau than plot, so they can feel oppressive in a single sitting.
Why read it
Read these for their compressed, unsettling vision of how quickly order gives way, and for prose that makes dread feel calm and physical.
Pages from the book
The sound the earth makes when it has been at war too long.
How was it that we had not heard it before! From everywhere—the exact place could not be defined—a groan, unbroken and scraping, wonderfully calm in its breadth, and even indifferent, as it seemed, was borne upon us. We had heard many cries and groans, but this resembled none of those heard before. On the dim reddish surface our eyes could perceive nothing, and therefore the very earth and sky, lit up by a never-rising sun, seemed to be groaning. A resurrected man walks toward the sunset and becomes a shadow.
And in the evening, when the sun, ruddy and swollen, was sinking in the west, sightless Lazarus slowly groped after it. He stumbled over stones and fell, fat and weak as he was, then he rose heavily and walked on. And against the crimson canvas of the sunset his dark form and outstretched arms gave him a monstrous resemblance to the cross. A song too honest for the person paid to listen to it.
Having composed it to the best of my ability, I meant to sing it loudly, as good songs should be sung, but my jailer would not allow it. My jailer’s ear is overgrown with hair; it has a strait and a narrow channel: fit for words that are untruthful, sly, words that can crawl upon their bellies like reptiles. But my words walk erect, they have deep chests, broad backs—ah, how painfully they tore at the tender ear of the jailer which was overgrown with hair! Leonid Andreyev.Andreyev trained as a lawyer and worked as a court reporter; his fiction returns again and again to trials, executions and the official machinery of death.
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Questions readers ask
- Is Short Fiction for me?
- You may like these if you enjoy gothic short fiction that stays close to panic, courts, executions and the thin edge of sanity. The mood is relentlessly bleak and some stories are more feverish tableau than plot, so they can feel oppressive in a single sitting.
- What is Short Fiction like?
- These stories move with a feverish, gothic unease, their calm prose tightening around madness, dread and ordinary people pushed past their limits. Feels like dread, unease and melancholy. About madness, death and war.
- What should I read after Short Fiction?
- If you liked Short Fiction, try The King in Yellow (Robert W. Chambers), Dracula's Guest (Bram Stoker) and In a Glass Darkly, v. 1/3 (Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu).
A taste of the feed
You walk toward your own double across a quicksand.
One night his dream was so vivid that when he awoke he could not believe that it had only been a dream. He shut his eyes again and again, but each time the vision, if it was a vision, or the reality, if it was a reality, would rise before him. The moon was shining full and yellow over the quicksand as he approached it; he could see the expanse of light shaken and disturbed and full of black shadows as the liquid sand quivered and trembled and wrinkled and eddied as was its wont between its pauses of marble calm. As he drew close to it another figure came towards it from the opposite side with equal footsteps.
Dracula's Guest · Bram Stoker
The thing that keeps an army moving is not hatred or fear.
But we did not stop. An unknown, mysterious force was drawing us—the strongest force in human life. Each of us, taken separately, would have gone home, but the whole mass went forward in obedience to discipline, and not from any recognition of the justice of the cause, nor from any feeling of hatred towards an unknown enemy; not from any fear of punishment, but moved solely by that hidden and unconscious something which will, for many a long day yet, lead humanity to sanguinary slaughter—the most potent cause of every description of human ill and suffering.
Short Fiction · Vsevolod Garshin
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