Status Updates From Black Water 2: More Tales o...

Finished:
The Miraculous Revenge by George Bernard Shaw
Room of Blood by Brett Balon

Starting:
The Shadow by Ben Hecht

Finished:
The Finder by Elizabeth Spencer
Desire by James Stephens

Starting:
The Miraculous Revenge by George Bernard Shaw

"The dusty frame of the window holds nine panes of double-glazed glass, three levels of three panes on top of each other. If Inspector Eckhardt stands on tiptoe on the threadbare carpet, the top panes are at his eye level. The middle row is comfortably situated for him, for he is a man of medium height. He has to stoop slightly however to look through the bottom row..."
'Eckhardt at the Window' by Eric McCormack

I've been admiring the way Alberto Manguel groups the stories in his Anthologies of the Fantastic since the beginning of the first volume. Charlotte Perkins Gillman's story, The Yellow Wall Paper, is a good example. Manguel placed it right after Peter Green's The House-Hunters, about the eerie doings in a strange house and right before Eric McCormack's Eckhardt at the Window about grisly murders in empty houses.

'The Fall of the House of Usher', he said, squinting up at the eaves. Then he chuckled, in a way he had when he was about to say something particularly unpleasant, and added, 'Do you remember that MR James story, The Mezzotint, wasn't it?' and left the rest of the sentence hanging in mid-air. I looked at the house again and the feeling I had tried to stifle ever since we arrived came flooding into my throat like bile

Finished:
The Haunted House by Luigi Pirandello

Starting
The Finder by Elizabeth Spencer

'Now they're going to see who I am, he said to himself in his strong new man's voice, many years after he had first seen the huge ocean liner without lights and without any sound which passed by the village one night like a great uninhabited palace, longer than the whole village and much taller than the steeple in the church...'
'The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship', Gabriel García Márquez

'The old man stood before them like a living monument. Most joys of existence meant nothing to him any more. But within him still trembled a faint echo of that sweet feeling of power he had known when he last held the rulership. It made you feel younger, stronger, more alive, to know that you could change the destiny of hundreds of thousands just by signing your name.'
'Faithful Peter', Lion Furchtwanger

My story was to be set in classical times, in the Mediterranean. My narrator would write plainly, without an attempt at period style or historical explanation. He would arrive—for a reason I had yet to work out—at that classical port with the walls and gateways like cutouts. He would walk past that muffled figure on the quayside. He would move from that silence to a doorway.."
The Enigma of Arrival, V. S. Naipaul

"I began to make my way to the door but at the third step I caught my foot in a ruck of the chocolate-coloured carpet and in reaching out my hand for support, I sent a small pink vase flying.
Suddenly I felt very small and very angry. I saw my mother's mouth opening and it reminded me of the front door and the front door reminded me of my urge to escape—but to where, to where?"
'Same Time, Same Place', Mervyn Peake

As they jostled they walked along, "a thought occurred to Ratanbabu. He was better off as he was—alone, without a friend. He didn't need a friend. Whenever he had spoken to Manilalbabu, it had seemed as if he was carrying on a conversation with himself, as if he knew all the answers before he asked the questions. There was no room for argument, no possibility of misunderstanding."
Ratanbabu and that Man, Satyajit Ray

"Tea was over (today it had been pilchard salad and chips); and Colvin had set out from the Emancipation Hotel, where he boarded, upon his regular evening walk. There had been no one else for tea and Mrs Royd had made it clear that the trouble he was causing had not passed unnoticed. Outside it was blowing as well as raining, so that Palmerston Street was almost deserted..."
'The Visiting Star' by Robert Aickman

Finished:
The Times My Father Died by Yehuda Amichai

Starting:
The Haunted House by Luigi Pirandello

'The versions of the story about Ch'ien-niang were so varied that some people said it was all a fabrication. But years later I heard the whole story from Chang Chung-hsien, who had it from his uncle, Ch'ien-niang's father, and when he told it to me, I wrote everything he said down. "In the third year of the T'ien-shou reign, Chang Yi of Ch'ing-ho came to live in Heng-chou..."'
'Ch'ien-niang' by Chen Xuanyou, c900 CEA

Her name was Belisa Crepusculario, not through baptism or because of her mother's insight but because she herself sought it out until she found it and dressed herself in it. Her occupation consisted of selling words...For 5 cents she would give out poems learnt by heart; for 7 she would improve the quality of dreams; for 9 she would write love letters; for 12 she would make up insults for enemies
'2 Words' I. Allende

Finished:
Mr Arcularis by Conrad Aiken, 5/9/2026 ***

Starting:
The Times My Father Died by Yehuda Amichai

Finished The Lefthanders by Günter Grass
Starting: Mr Arcularis by Conrad Aiken

Starting "The Lefthanders" by Gunter Grass

Finished:
The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Starting:
Eckhardt at a Window by Eric McCormack

He went to bed and slept and dreamt, I may as well make it clear at once that his story did not turn out to be a dream in the last paragraph. The division between sleeping and waking was abrupt although the feeling of both was the same.They were both in the same sphere of horrible absurdity though in the former he was asleep and in the latter almost terribly awake.He tried to be asleep several times
THE TROLL THWhite

"Five sparrows rose aloft and flew away amidst shrieks. Only five half-empty beer bottles, several chewed-on slices of bread and butter, and the fallen mandolin (a still life that left me slightly dismayed) testified that young lives had been in full flower here just a few seconds earlier."
Wolfgang Hildesheimer, 'Why I Changed into a Nightingale'

Finished:
The House-Hunters by Peter Green

Starting:
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall Paper

"Mr Dombey, the zombie, took the 8.10 train every morning of the working week. On the way to London he read a newspaper, carefully digesting the spate of words so that its essence might be spewed up again later..."

Geoffrey Drayton, 'Mr Dombey, the Zombie'