Stories
In "The Price" a middle-aged writer living with his family in rural England adopts a stray black cat. Every night the cat shows signs of desperate combat resulting in serious wounds. When the writer stays up one night to see who is fighting the cat, he sees a demonic, shapeshifting creature approach his home, only to be drive off at great cost by the black cat. The story ends with the writer "selfishly" wondering how long the cat can keep defending his home and family.
"Daughter of Owls" takes place in some 17th century English village, with a framing device set in Victorian or early Edwardian times. An infant foundling girl is discovered with owl feathers in her basket and an owl pellet clutched in one hand. The women of the village believe her to be a witch or other supernatural creature of evil and suggest that she be put to death. However, the elder men of the village give her instead to a former nun living in a ruined convent. The girl grows up as a feral child -- because no human voice ever speaks to her—and when she matures her beauty sparks inspires the men of the village to make a disastrous plan to exploit her.
Read more about this topic: Creatures Of The Night (comics)
Famous quotes containing the word stories:
“If you like to make things out of wood, or sew, or dance, or style people’s hair, or dream up stories and act them out, or play the trumpet, or jump rope, or whatever you really love to do, and you love that in front of your children, that’s going to be a far more important gift than anything you could ever give them wrapped up in a box with ribbons.”
—Fred M. Rogers (20th century)
“Though Margery is stricken dumb
If thrown in Madge’s way,
We three make up a solitude;
For none alive to-day
Can know the stories that we know
Or say the things we say....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“The return of the asymmetrical Saturday was one of those small events that were interior, local, almost civic and which, in tranquil lives and closed societies, create a sort of national bond and become the favorite theme of conversation, of jokes and of stories exaggerated with pleasure: it would have been a ready- made seed for a legendary cycle, had any of us leanings toward the epic.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)