Yes! That was it. I read it in a lit class in college. Made me cry, too.
Another story we read in the same class (actually, an essay), and again for some reason I cannot remember the author or the title, was about Lizzie Borden’s parents’ last few days. It went into great detail about the heat, and their meals (lamb, then leftover lamb, and then some more leftover lamb), and the lack of refrigeration and how the fat in the lamb would congeal…mundane but grisly. By the end of it you’re thinking, “Man, wonder why Lizzie didn’t axe’em both ages ago!”
When Jo and Laurie did NOT get married and instead he married her annoying little sister and she got stuck with that geezer and never got to see Europe. I was all set to see Beth go because she was annoying but shafting JO? I refused to read the sequels but I preferred to think of Laurie as living a dissolute life with umpteen mistresses while Amy became a frigid socialite. Of course, even in my kindest fantasies Jo always had frowsy hair and was nursing an invalid pre-Viagra.
Lots of scars on that one. Even Janie got her Mr. Rochester (albeit, a cyclops version).
I read an excerpt in Reader’s Digest. She’s standing there refusing to believe what just happened.
anu-la1979, why all the hatred for Little Women? Jo and Laurie were too similar, they would never be happy, and Jo was smart enough to realize that. She truly loved her “Professor,” and it was her own fault that she didn’t go to Europe.
You’re welcome. I went to my favorite horror message board. They know everything horror over there, and when they’re not pimping their books, they answer questions.
You’ll be happy to know, then, that Alcott only married Jo off to Professor Bhaer under extreme pressure from her fans. She was supposed to stay an old maid who wrote, instead of a wife and mother and headmistress of that boarding school.
I was a big Stephen King fan in my teens. The short story i think the OP is talking about is I Am The Doorway. Creepy as hell.
My most favorite King short story is The Jaunt. Besides the great sci-fi tale of the invention of tele-portation, it realizes one of the most haunting ideas imaginable: The idea of the mind existing in a state of unblinking consciousness, alone and in absolute darkness for billions of years (and there’s nothing you can do but endure it), terrifies me to this day.
Yes, it was I am the Doorway.
The Jaunt was creepy, too, tho it didn’t scare me as much…I kind of saw it coming from page 1.
And I loved Jo & Mr. Bhaer’s love story. I thought that whole book was completely charming, and Amy really changes towards the end of the book. Beth’s death matures her, IMO.
The last time a thread like this went around someone mentioned a story about a man who becomes convinced his skeleton has a life of its own and is just waiting for the rest of him to die. Maybe I shouldn’t be reading this thread in the middle of the night. God, I am so lame, even short summaries of scary stories can creep me out.
When I was about seven or eight, I read this one story in some stupid scary stories collection in which a shadow murders a kid and his family during a storm just as the last candle blew out. I couldn’t sleep that night and ended up curled up in the rocking chair reading the least scary stories I could find, my Babysitters’ Club books.
The illustrations in Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark freaked me out too.
