Haunting Works We Love
In keeping with the spirit of the season, STET Happens is embracing all things editorial surrounding Halloween, that most spooky and chilling time of year. Books upon poems upon short stories have been based on this holiday, with page after page building fear, intrigue, and suspense one word at a time. Without the written (and edited) word, we couldn’t shiver at Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s “It was a dark and stormy night,” William Shakespeare couldn’t warn of impending doom with “Something wicked this way comes,” and there would be no Joseph Conrad’s “The horror! The horror!” to emphatically conclude a dramatic reveal.
In appreciation of how authors string unforgettable words together, and how they stick with us forever, here is a small collection of some of our favorite scary tales and their transportive opening lines:
“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—
Only this and nothing more.”
“The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years—if it ever did end—began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.”
“In the bosom of one of those spacious coves which indent the eastern shore of the Hudson, at that broad expansion of the river denominated by the ancient Dutch navigators the Tappan Zee, and where they always prudently shortened sail and implored the protection of St. Nicholas when they crossed, there lies a small market town or rural port, which by some is called Greensburgh, but which is more generally and properly known by the name of Tarry Town.”
“It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.”
“When shall we three meet again?
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
...
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.”
“I stood upon the hearth-rug and picked up the stick which our visitor had left behind him the night before.”
“In the corner of a first-class smoking carriage, Mr. Justice Wargrave, lately retired from the bench, puffed at a cigar and ran an interested eye through the political news in the Times.”
“3 May. Bistritz. — Left Munich at 8:35 P.M., on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6:46, but train was an hour late.”
““I see…” said the vampire thoughtfully, and slowly he walked across the room towards the window.”
“Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance, that was never lighted by a smile; lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow loveable.”
“It was a small town by a small river and a small lake in a small northern part of a Midwest state.”
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