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:
“Television programming for children need not be saccharine or insipid in order to give to violence its proper balance in the scheme of things.... But as an endless diet for the sake of excitement and sensation in stories whose plots are vehicles for killing and torture and little more, it is not healthy for young children. Unfamiliar as yet with the full story of human response, they are being misled when they are offered perversion before they have fully learned what is sound.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)
“All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter.... For me “style” is matter.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.”
—Eudora Welty (b. 1909)