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:
“Castaway, your time is a flat sea that doesn’t stop,
with no new land to make for and no new stories to swap.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“Every one of my friends had a bad day somewhere in her history she wished she could forget but couldn’t. A very bad mother day changes you forever. Those were the hardest stories to tell. . . . “I could still see the red imprint of his little bum when I changed his diaper that night. I stared at my hand, as if they were alien parts of myself . . . as if they had betrayed me. From that day on, I never hit him again.””
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“Fairy tales are loved by the child not because the imagery he finds in them conforms to what goes on within him, but because—despite all the angry, anxious thoughts in his mind to which the fairy tale gives body and specific content—these stories always result in a happy outcome, which the child cannot imagine on his own.”
—Bruno Bettelheim (20th century)