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More Short Stories: Paula Cappa’s “Tales of Terror”

According to our statistics, it appears that I was correct in saying that there actually is a LOT of interest in short stories. I’d like to share with you a resource I just discovered that can direct you to some excellent ones. Paula Cappa, author of Night Sea Journey (reviewed here)  and The Dazzling Darkness (reviewed here) has a blog with a feature called Tuesday’s Tale of Terror. Each blog entry gives a brief synopsis and background on a supernatural short story(almost always in the public domain, meaning they are older stories), with links to the actual story when available,  for free. Sometimes she even has links to additional formats: in her entry on W.W. Jacobs’  “The Monkey’s Paw”, she also provides a link to an adaptation on YouTube. Middle and high school teachers, take note: I see at least a few stories here that appeared in my English textbooks. With the Common Core emphasis on nonfiction driving spending, this could be a good supplemental resource for building a fiction collection.

I do want to note that the titles to Cappa’s blog entries are not the names of the stories, but are descriptive of content. The title is listed just below, at the top of the entry (meaning you can’t just scroll quickly down the page and have a story’s title jump out at you) “The Chilly and Darksome Vale of Years”, for instance, is the title for the entry on “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment”.

If you are looking for more current stories, you will have to look elsewhere, but there’s a lot of good stuff here, and plenty to explore.  Paula has done all the hard work for you.

New Educator Resources Page

One of the top drivers of traffic to MonsterLibrarian.com is a lesson plan on writing scary stories by Kellie Hayden. So I know many teachers visit our site, even if it’s just for a minute. In an effort to better serve the educators who visit us, I’ve started an Educator Resources page, with links to lesson plans, webquests, booklists, and activities related to Halloween, scary stories, and whatever else I think might be of interest to teachers and librarians looking for ideas or ways to integrate cool scary (or not so scary) stuff into what you’re doing. If you have additional resources to suggest you can send us suggestions at monsterlibrarian@monsterlibrarian.com. Just title your email “Educator Resources” , so it won’t get lost in the shuffle.