I’m starting online classes on 2nd November (yay), so let’s just pretend this is Monday’s post.
Image: On a dark tiled floor, half a dozen money plants (also called pothos, devil's ivy) and one variety of decorative bamboo are bathed in eerie pink light. The purple pink shadows reach out behind them violetly. The bottles are scattered about, like someone took the indoor plants for a sunning in the balcony, and then forgot them there.
See, see, I know that Halloween is a Western cultural product that’s impressed into our collective consciousness like an anvil through wet concrete (ditto for drive-throughs and the notion of fall colours and whatever the heck Twinkies are), but unless you have a carefully curated internet feed it’s impossible to be online and miss the approach of spooky season (or for that matter, the American elections, which are spooky in their own right), and I, for one, appreciate the excuse to lean into the macabre, the ghostly, and the persistent terror of existing.
That being said, when we opened the door of our new apartment on the 31st of October (this was a few years ago), I was profoundly unprepared to find a handful of dressed-up kids demanding candy. I might have a shaky grip on the whole concept of Trick-or-Treating, but I was quite sure that children in costumes belonged to movies, TV and USA. Seeing them outside our own front door felt unreasonable, like bumping into Santa Claus on the terrace. I understand the appeal, of course, but they should have warned us—they were profoundly disappointed at the single packet of chocolate my mother dug out.
I promised unsettling short stories, and here they are. Most of these are best when you don’t know what you’re about to get, so I’ll try to go easy on the details.
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison is one of those inescapable classics of post-apocalyptic horror Sci Fi. Naturally it involves a super-computer.
Reality falls apart in Jeremy M. Davies’ No Sleep till Auschwitz.
Ray Bradbury is a treasure, but the kind you keep at a respectful distance. The Veldt (an electronic nursery that can recreate whole biomes, what could go wrong?) is well-known, so I’d recommend The Long Rain if you like the monsoon and Marionettes, Inc. if you’ve ever wanted a human-like robot to do your homework.
Watch Mum deal with an epidemic of Janices in Rachel Lachmansingh’s The Species is Dead.
Precisely because of its classic British humour, Donald Barthelme’s Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby is an absurdist and low-key horrific story that leaves you with the taste of Three Men in a Boat.
A bored big-game hunter finds a worthy prey in The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell.
If I were to pick a short story to be my nemesis, it would be The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Stetson. I came away with slowly escalating horror that feels like clammy fingers on your skin, and the resolve to never move into a house with a yellow wallpaper.
Art and electronics mix in dangerous ways in Lena Valencia’s The Blue Room.
I’m usually against jargon and textbook language, but I loved STET by Sarah Gailey. This is an extract from a (obviously fictional) textbook about self-driving cars and whether AI have consciousness. For context, Stet means ‘an instruction to ignore a marked alteration on a printed proof’.
Utopia is not what it seems in The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin.
Fran Wilde’s Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand is a museum of wonders and nightmares.
S. Qiouyi Lu brings together insects and rape culture in Anything Resembling Love.
A cellist loses his left hand and makes a decision in Mary Robinette Kowal’s For Solo Cello, op. 12.
Try This One Weird Trick for A More Youthful Look in Minutes by Maria Romasco Moore is the only one on this list I haven’t read past paragraph two, and that’s because it’s truly horrifying. Read it if you dare.
Image: Suzanna Rabindran
I feel bad for the kids! All decked up for Halloween 🎃 but then getting chocolates was cool. I kind of have a weird feeling every time I read an unsettling short story. The endings are weird and I doubt my abilities to comprehend. Most of the times I end up getting confused! Unsettling indeed! But thanks for the list and All the best for the online classes. Thank you for the weekend surprise!
Happy Halloween to everyone!