The Fantastic in Fiction

Everybody thinks that when God cast me out, I fell directly from Heaven to Hell. That’s not true. I was able to catch myself on Earth for a time. I was angered both by the fickle nature of the humans and God’s obliviousness of their flaws until I realized that it must be a test. […]

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Barbaric Christmas Decorations    A little boy, two feet tall, gazed up with wide eyes around at all the sparkling red and green lights, the Snoopy stuffed animals and the tree decorations that glittered with glee. It was that time of the year. His grandmother held his hand as they walked down the aisle, amazed by […]

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I wrapped my scarf more tightly around my neck in an attempt to stave off the November chill.  A gust of wind blew rain in my face and I shivered.  It had been an unseasonably warm autumn until about a week ago, when the temperatures had plummeted and rain clouds came rolling in off the […]

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Anna looked around to see families walking around the brightly lit fairgrounds, but she knew that this night would quickly turn into sorrow. She could feel that something was going to go wrong. The tension of it consumed Anna as she walked in the midst of the crowds, food trucks, and fair rides, with her […]

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They say that red skies in the morning are a sailor’s warning. Unfortunately, that warning doesn’t apply to the Royal Navy. Every man on the ship felt a sense of unease when they woke to red skies and unnaturally calm seas. The glass water reflected the ship as it cut through the leagues. Men went […]

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  “Fashion is an expression of boredom, of restlessness. The successful designer understands the ferocity of that boredom and provides it with new places in which to calmits rage for a while.” In “A Change in Fashion,” vanishing, exaggeration, and boredom is a continuous theme that brings out the human experience of infatuation with what […]

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Every day here is like deer season.  We are allowed to flourish in this space free of men our age, only seeing them when we choose, allowed to be more genuine relaxed versions of ourselves.  Do we appreciate it enough?  For us, it’s more than just one day a year, so the novelty wears off. […]

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The other town, when we enter, suddenly casts over our town a therness, an otherness, which we find pleasing, if a little confusing. It’s almost as if we can’t feel our town, cannot know about it, until we’re there, in the other town, imagining our town on the other side of the woods. So perhaps […]

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“I felt like a damn fool whenever I actually said anything about this kind of feeling and she looked at me like she could start hating me real easy and so I was working on saying nothing, even if it meant locking myself up.” Butler chooses to have us read this story from first person point […]

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“But now she appears from the hallway and I look at her and she is still slim and she is beautiful, I think—at least I clearly remember that as her husband I found her beautiful in this state. Now, though, she seems too naked. Plucked. I find that a sad thing. I am sorry for […]

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For the dome, but you say, how to transform the entire country into a gigantic mall, whose sole purpose is to encourage feverish consumption.” (p. 118)   Millhauser’s short story, “The Dome,” has an extremely fantastic world in which these domes are invented that are able to cover, protect, and isolate a house. Then the […]

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  Indeed, one might argue that under the regime of the Dome, the country has become not a mall but an immense hall of entertainment, in which every citizen is a player. Certain unpleasant facts of life—rundown neighborhoods, traffic accidents, robberies, drive-by shootings—are in this view taken less seriously, since they are felt to be […]

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Read this article and then compose a short short story that makes use of the fantastic. Your story should be entitled “The Pard.” You will then read it to the class.

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[T]hat single word, “love,” was trying to compress within itself a multitude of meanings, was trying to take many precise and separate feelings and crush them into a single mushy mass, which I was being asked to hold in m y hands like a big sticky ball. We’ve talked a lot about the choices a […]

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You turned slowly to me. I remember the lazy roll of your head, your cheek against the vinyl strips, your hair flattened on one side, your eyelids sleepy. You said, “Do you love me?” Your voice was flirtatious, easy—you weren’t asking me to put a doubt to rest. I smiled, opened my mouth to answer, […]

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I’ve seen krill accelerate toward the maw of Team Whale, streaming bubbles, a mute shrimp battle cry.” (p.140) In Russell’s short story, “Dougbert Shackleton’s Rules for Antarctic Tailgating,” the narrator goes into detail about these Food Chain Games in the Antarctic between whales and krill. This story is very fantastical because it takes this wild, […]

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Characters that Inhabit Fantastical Elements  There are a couple of confusing elements in this story.  First, the characters have the same names.  Secondly, the characters have the same personality traits as the person they are named after. Though this is confusing it brings forth an interesting idea that there is no individual identity and that […]

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“‘I learned from falling in love with that Koenig & Bauer. Infatuation is worth nothing. It has nothing to do with the real world.’ She nodded at the steam engine looming in the corner by her bed. ‘Me and Hercules, we have an understanding. We take care of each other. It’s a better kind of […]

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Although the laugh parlors existed in fact, for we all attended them and even began to form clubs of our own, they also continued to lead a separate and in a sense higher existence in the realm of rumor, which had the effect of lifting them into the inaccessible and mythical.” p. 78 In this […]

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