26 Short Stories Flashcards
1
Q
“The Fall of the House of Usher”
(1839) by Edgar Allan Poe
A
- Unnamed Narrator
- First-person, Protagonist POV
- Roderick Usher is Narrator’s best and only friend
- Madeline is Roderick Usher’s twin sister.
- Intertwines the fate of the House with its lord.
- Personification of the House into a vampiric or ghostly force.
- The house is not haunted by a past atrocity, it does the actual haunting.
2
Q
“Young Goodman Brown”
(1835) by Nathaniel Hawthorne
A
- Goodman Brown
- Third-person, limited POV
- Hawthorne is known for his New England Gothic tales
Three thing could have happened in the woods:
1. The Devil came to Goodman Brown and showed him a witches’ Sabbath.
2. The Devil came to Goodman Brown and showed him a false vision of his fellow villagers.
3. Goodman Brown dreamt the entire witches’ Sabbath.
3
Q
“The Death of Halpin Frayser”
(1891) by Ambrose Bierce
A
- Halpin Frayser
- Third-person, Limited and Omniscient POV
- Shifting POVs
- The Cthulhu Mythos genealogy can be traced back to Chambers and Bierce.
Section One: Starts on a Californian mountain, Frayser walks in the woods and has a dream.
Section Two: A flashback surveys who Frayser is and how he ended up in this part of California. He has a close relationship with his mother, whose own dream is mentioned.
Section Three: Returning to where we left off in S1, we witness Frayser’s death in his dream.
Section Four:The day after Frayser’s walk in the woods, two detectives find a corpse and try to piece together what little they know about the murderer they are tracking.
4
Q
“The Yellow Sign” (1895) by Robert W. Chambers
A
- Unnamed Narrator
- First-person, Protagonist POV
- In the tales, the text lures characters into reading an innocuous First Act. The Second Act
drives them into insanity and deep despair. - The Cthulhu Mythos genealogy can be traced back to Chambers and Bierce
5
Q
“The Outsider” (1921) by H. P. Lovecraft
A
- Unnamed Narrator
- First-person, Protagonist POV
- Five Revelations
- A rewritting of Lovecraft as an Outsider
Plot: Narrator’s escape from a claustrophobic home and his gradual revelation that he is not who he thought himself to be. Experiences weird revelations (shared with the reader). Narrator has no sense of his personal history. Climbs the tower to seek the light and to glimpse at the night sky. He sees a revelry in a castle, but causes the townspeople to run away in terror. He realizes that he is not human.
6
Q
“The Rats in The Walls” (1923) by H. P. Lovecraft
A
- Narrator is Delapore
- Inherits an ancient estate in England known as Exham Priory and restores it.
- Third-person, limitated POV
- A cat with the “N” word as a name
- strange occurrences and mysterious sounds plague the house
- learns about his ancestor’s practices: human sacrifice and cannibalism
- Delapore’s descents into madness after the shocking revelation
7
Q
“The Call of Cthulhu” (1926) H. P. Lovecraft
A
- Narrator: Francis Wayland Thurston (gentleman scholar)
- First-person, Protagonist POV
- Investigation into the mysterious events surrounding the cult of Cthulhu.
- Reveal the existence of an ancient and malevolent entity known as Cthulhu.
- Learns of the cult’s efforts to awaken the sleeping god and the dire consequences this would have for humanity.
8
Q
“The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1926) H. P. Lovecraft
A
- First-person, Protagonist POV
- Narrator: Olmstead (gentleman scholar and coming-of-age)
- Bound for Arkham from Newburyport
- Arrival in Innsmouth
- Zadok Allen
- Escape from Innsmouth
- Genealogical Research
- External Threat of Cosmic Horror + Internal Threat of Cosmic Horror
- Narrator’s realization that he bears the same genetic makeup as the creatures he learned to
fear.
9
Q
“The Black Stone”
(1931) by Robert E. Howard
A
- Unnamed narrator
- First-person, Protagonist POV
- Associated with Pulp Fiction
Five tropes of Lovecraftian horror found in the story:
1. Archaeologist / Gentleman Scholar Narrator: narrator is an antiquarian and archaeologist;
2. Cursed Object / Book: The Black Book and the Black Stone has baleful power;
3. Weird Dream / Premonition: Narrator experiences a Weird Dream after visiting the Black Stone on Midsummer’s Night;
4. Spatiotemporal Event|Midsummer / February-April: moment in time-space when the call of the Weird is stronger;
5. Historical / Ancient Artifact: artifact or monolith that is a symbol of the eldritch terrors which roam the Earth beyond our view.
10
Q
“The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis” (1932) by Clark Ashton Smith
A
- First-person, Protagonist POV
- Narrator: Rodney Severn
- Associated with Pulp Fiction
- Vaults suggests that the immemorial Past swallows up everything.
- Octave and his crew find a perfectly mummified body held to the wall in chains.
- In the dust of the mummy’s decay, a creature is freed from its host.
- The Cyclopean Past, as represented by the vaults and brain leeches, swallows the archaeologists seeking it out.
- The Cyclopean reduces civilizations into nothingness
11
Q
“A Study in Emerald”
(2003) by Neil Gaiman
A
- First-person, Protagonist POV
- Narrator: Sebastian Moran
- Detective friend: James Moriarty
- “A Study in Emerald” parodies Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “A Study in Scarlet”
- The concealment of the Unreliable Narrator that leads to a revelation at the end, essentially defamiliarizes Holmes and Watson
- Normalizing the Old Ones, Gaiman defamiliarizes Victorian nobility and the royal family.
- The inherent horror of a class-based society
12
Q
“A Redress for Andromeda”
(2000) by Caitlín R. Kiernan
A
- Narrator: Tara (marine biologist)
- Third-person, limited POV
- Tara is invited to a Halloween party held at a rundown old house. Knows no one there, except for her lover, Darren. The partygoers belong in a secret society who plan to tie her to an annual ritual, where they appease a monstrous sentinel (“once a woman”) who guards the thresholds and gates between land and sea.
- The redress for Andromeda is an armistice or truce between the land and the sea in the form of a female humanoid sea monster
13
Q
“Up from Slavery”
(2019) by Victor LaValle
A
- First-person, Protagonist POV
- Narrator: Simon
- A nonfiction slave memoir and autobiography of Washington
- The “ideal slaves” who perform the laborious tasks for the community. These masses are called Shoggoths.
- Simon represents an individual awakening to a new consciousness. He embodies a hope for the future.
1. His realization of his identity as a Shoggoth.
2. His refusal of his white father’s inheritance.
3. His promise to find others like him, to rouse them from their slumber to defeat the Man in the Baggy Suit.
14
Q
“Give It Up”
(1936) by Franz Kafka
A
- Narrator: Unknown
- First-person, Protagonist POV
- Modernist writer
- The story begins with nightmarish emptiness in the streets and an anxious pressure of being late and lost in a labyrinth of an urban landscape.
- Captured the existential plight of urban dwellers through the depictions of weird encounters
15
Q
“The Imperial Message”
(1931) by Franz Kafka
A
- An Emperor and his messenger
- Second point-of-view (beginning and end)
- The reader awaits the Imperial Message which never arrives.
- Modern individual’s submit to their own alienation.
- Shows the profound isolation of the individual in the 20th-century nation-state.
