O. Henry had a gift for wrapping heartbreak in humor. His stories feel light, almost playful—until that last line hits and you realize he’s been quietly aiming for your chest the whole time.

In The Skylight Room, we meet a bright, hopeful young woman renting the smallest, loneliest room in New York. But she still finds a way to fill it—with imagination, with laughter, and with a star she names Billy Jackson.

What happens next is pure O. Henry: tender, tragic, and—somehow—still kind of beautiful.

We are expanding our universe of short story podcasts on our new podcast channel, Short StoryVerses. Listen to some of Don's new, original short stories on the "New Tales Told" podcast. Look it up on your favorite podcast player.

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Halloween is the season of the macabre and one the greatest authors of dark frightening fiction was Edgar Allen Poe.

You can cover the body. Hide the blood. Swear you’re sane. But you can’t silence the sound. Beneath the floorboards… something still beats.

Considered to be the finest American Gothic writer of all time, Edgar Allen Poe loved to pen short stories. Of course, his best known tales are his darkest. This makes sense as Poe himself stated that he often suffered from bouts of depression and madness.

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This is one of those scary stories that sneaks up on you. It looks like just another day in small-town America, sometime around the early 1950s. But then, something is wrong. Something is hanging there. And what’s most unsettling isn’t the horror itself — it’s how calmly everyone else reacts.

Philip K. Dick wrote The Hanging Stranger in 1953, and it remains one of his most chilling short stories. It’s about paranoia, conformity, and the terrifying idea that maybe you’re the only one who sees the truth.

Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) was one of the most influential science fiction writers of the 20th century, famous for works like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (which inspired Blade Runner), The Man in the High Castle, and Ubik. His stories often explore paranoia, alternate realities, and the fragile line between perception and truth.

The Hanging Stranger was first published in 1953 in the pulp magazine Science Fiction Adventures. Under U.S. copyright law, any story published before 1964 had to have its copyright renewed in the 28th year after publication. If the renewal wasn’t filed, the work automatically fell into the public domain. The copyright for The Hanging Stranger was never renewed, so it is now freely available for adaptation and performance.

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Every October, we creep into the scary season on Litreading, digging deep into the trove of classic horror tales from around the world. Some of the most frightening stories of all time were penned more than 100 years ago by authors like Mary Shelly and Edgar Allen Poe. One of the greats of the early 20th century was H.P. Lovecraft, and this is one of his earliest tales.

In a distant land where shadows stretch long and justice is rarely served, one ancient law stands above all: no man may kill a cat. But this wasn’t always the case. Journey to Ulthar, where a dark tale unfolds—of orphaned grief, whispered spells, and the night when the cats rose up… and vanished into the mist with vengeance in their eyes.

During H. P. Lovecraft’s short life (he died at age 46), he barely eked out an existence by ghostwriting and editing the work of others. Yet, as he struggled financially, he penned in obscurity what would soon be seen as some of the greatest gothic horror stories of all time.

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Ghost stories have been told around the world and are often based on mythical creatures or spirits. Those living in the cold, snowy regions of Japan created the legend of a winter spirit called Yuki-Onna (or snow woman) whose beauty allows her to prey on those lost in brutal winter storms.

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Please note: "Murder of Crows" is one of the early episodes of my new podcast, New Tales Told. I published it here to share it with my large Litreading audience. However, it will eventually only be available on New Tales Told. If you haven't yet done so, please search for New Tales Told on this podcast service or visit shortstoryverses.com to listen to this and my other original stories.

There’s a reason crows gather in cemeteries. They remember. They watch. And sometimes, they wait. Murder of Crows isn’t a tale borrowed from the past—it’s one I wrote for New Tales Told, a series of original stories that echo in the spaces between memory and myth. This one lingers in the cold silence of the American frontier, where the shadows are long and the watchers have wings.

Set in Montana Territory, 1868, Murder of Crows is a western—but not the kind you remember from Saturday matinees. The dead don’t rest. The land doesn’t forget. And the crows? They remember everything.

Author's Note

There’s an old belief that crows remember faces. That they mourn their dead. That they never forget a slight.

It was early morning when a murder of crows descended on the sycamore outside my bedroom window, their cries so sharp and relentless they pulled me from sleep with a strange sense of dread. I lay there, half-conscious and irritated, staring at the ceiling as their screams echoed through the glass. And in that moment—quietly, almost reflexively—I had a thought I wasn’t proud of: Maybe this murder deserves one of its own.

From that flash of anger came something unexpected: a story. Murder of Crows began as a whisper of guilt and folklore. Though it draws faint inspiration from the life and legend of Jeremiah Johnson, this tale is entirely imagined—fiction through and through. But like many stories, its roots are tangled in real emotion: grief, memory, regret… and the uncanny way the natural world sometimes stares back.

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