Writers are always told to read widely and voraciously because you can’t write if you don’t read. With that suggestion usually comes a list of recommended reading, stories which are meant to exemplify the best writing.
I’ve been contemplating “best of” and “recommended reading” lists of short stories lately. I like to peruse the lists to see which stories would make my own personal list, which ones I’ve read, and which ones I haven’t read. Sometimes the lists inspire me to seek out the titles I haven’t read. Other times, I shrug my way through a list, wondering why someone thought “that” title deserved such a coveted spot.
Some stories on the lists went in one ear and out the other, leaving little behind other than the ability to say, “Oh, yeah, I read that.”
Other stories moved into my brain and took up residence. For the purposes of this blog, I’m calling those stories the most memorable.
The first short stories I remember reading that affected me so profoundly that they stuck in my memory with a single reading were by Ray Bradbury. “All Summer in a Day,” which I first read in junior high, made me feel ill, horrified by the casual cruelty of children towards their classmate. A few years later, I remember the sense of dread from reading “There Will Come Soft Rains.” While I read Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game” around the same time as I read “All Summer in a Day,” and I remember it clearly, it didn’t haunt me the way the Bradbury stories did.
In fact, when I began to make a personal list of short stories that stuck with me over the years, I realized that many of the short stories I remembered the best had inspired unease, dread, or anxiety. Of course, in the case of Edgar Allan Poe, making a shiver run down one’s spine was his goal. Who isn’t made uneasy by the idea of being walled into a basement and left to die, as in “The Cask of Amontillado”?
While what one human could do to another or to humanity as a whole is terrifying, somehow, when the enemy is nature and the danger is impersonal and implacable, the dread I felt was even worse. That is why Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” stayed with me.
Disgust made Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” memorable. The less said about that novella, the better.
The characters willing to give up their prized possessions for each other in O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi,” rather than inspiring me, perplexed and annoyed me. I remember thinking that if those people had communicated better, the end result would have been much better. But then I’m not one for trying to surprise people with gifts. The story remained in my brain though. Of O. Henry’s works, I preferred “The Ransom of Red Chief” for its humor.
Humor is why Thurber’s “Sitting in the Catbird Seat” and “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” stayed with me in spite of their more serious themes.
For humor coupled with shock and horror, I have to list Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” I did not see where that one was going, so it shocked me. The form of the story is also startling, disobeying all the rules one is generally taught for short story writing.
Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories made an impact en masse. But I read them long after Encyclopedia Brown short stories taught me the form of a detective story as a child.
I can think of other memorable stories, but the ones above top my list. Listing memorable novels would take a whole separate blog. How about you? Do you have a particular story or list of stories that have stuck with you when others have faded away?
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N. M. Cedeño is a short story writer and novelist living in Texas. She is active in Sisters in Crime- Heart of Texas Chapter and is a member of the Short Mystery Fiction Society. Find out more at nmcedeno.com
Ink-Stained Wretches 