The Mangler is a Stephen King short story about a demonic, sentient laundry press machine that causes a series of gruesome deaths at a laundromat, which a police detective investigates, eventually discovering the machine is possessed and attempting to exorcise it. First published in Cavalier magazine in 1972, it was later collected in King’s 1978…
Bartleby, the Scrivener is a famous short story by Herman Melville, first published in 1853, about a Wall Street lawyer who hires a quiet, efficient copyist named Bartleby, who gradually begins to refuse all work with the phrase, “I would prefer not to,” leading to his tragic isolation and demise. The story explores themes of…
Come read the story that was the inspiration for the Chevy Chase movie, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, written by famous movie director (before he was famous) John Hughes. Before the Breakfast Club and Uncle Buck, Hughes was a writer for the Lampoon. Enjoy! Christmas ’59 by John Hughes (National Lampoon) All in all it was…
Yes we know, this is a long-ass story. but we just love it so much. Diamond as Big as the Ritz, too! Tales of the Jazz Age by F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Jelly-Bean First published in 1922 collection Tales of the Jazz Age, the story follows Jim Powell, a lazy but likable young man in…
The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde is a classic fairy about a giant who builds a wall around his beautiful garden to keep children out, leading to perpetual winter in his garden until a special child’s love melts his heart, bringing spring back and teaching him the value of generosity and forgiveness. The story is…
Anton Chekhov’s The Lady with the Dog is a nuanced short story about Dmitri Gurov, a disillusioned married banker, and Anna Sergeyevna, a young married woman, who begin an affair while vacationing in Yalta. What starts as a casual fling transforms into deep, mutual love, forcing them to confront the emptiness of their conventional lives…
The Night the Ghost Got In by James Thurber is one of our favorite stories from the man who practically put the New Yorker on the map. That’s right, back then magazines like the New Yorker, the Saturday Evening Post and Colliers were jam-packed with short stories. Today, as Vonnegut often said, you couldn’t even…
Can you believe it? With the hundreds of stories here on Real Flashbytes, we don’t have any Poe. Not one story. So, no better way to start things off than with the Tell-tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe, circa. 1843. The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe is one of the best known stories ever.…
“The Sisters B-36” is a fictional short story by recurring alter-ego character Kilgore Trout. As you know, Trout is one of the most enduring Vonnegut characters, appearing in many novels and short stories. Yes, he is KV’s alter-ego, but he is also the vehicle for Vonnegut to continue writing short stories, and inserting them into…
Daggermouth by H. M. Wolfe @hmwolfe #hmwolfe #daggermouth by H. M. Wolfe is a viral dark dystopian romance novel about a mercenary, Shadera, who is forced into a political marriage with Greyson, the president’s son, after botching his assassination in a corrupt, surveillance-heavy city. The book is the first in The Heart Duology, an enemies-to-lovers…