Young Teen Short Stories

When a young John Lambton skips church to go fishing, he catches something unnatural. Fearful of his father's reaction to both skipping church and bringing such a foul creature to the house - he it throws in the well. Years later, after fighting in the Crusades, John returns home to an unpleasant surprise.

"Local color" author Frances Gilchrist Wood wrote this powerful tale of a young wife who proves better able to succeed on the homestead frontier than does her husband.

Here is another of O. Henry's entertaining "surprise ending" stories. A girl moves to the city looking for a friend she had lost track of and finds him in a very unusual way.

"The Adventure of the Abbey Grange" is one of the 56 Sherlock Holmes short stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and is one of 13 stories in the collection The Return of Sherlock Holmes.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was an English romantic and gothic novelist who is most famous as the author of Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. She was married to the notable Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. She also wrote a number of shorter "tales of the unnatural", of which "The Mortal Immortal", a story of a man who will not die, is the most famous.

When it comes to short stories, Edgar Allan Poe is considered by many to be the master of terror and the macabre. This is one of his most famous stories. A man is tormented by a cat and decides to take a terrible vengeance, but things do not go as planned.

Via a series of letters between himself and a friend, a man falls in love with a woman he has never met - and receives a shocking surprise when he travels to meet her.

Never seen before private diary entries they don’t want you to know about. Peek into the mind of the making of a maverick, a window to the soul of an angry, young girl, who will come of age in a city on the verge of total annihilation.

Mr. Cave, a shop owner, finds a strange crystal egg that serves as a window into a Martian landscape. The War of the Worlds was probably H.G. Wells' best-known work, but this brief tale indicates that he had more than a passing interest in Mars.

Here is one of London's famous stories of the Klondike, where men had to battle the elements, and often each other, to survive.

A motley crew, banished from a Western town, find strength, and weakness, in each other.

Mia Tyler had a crush on Jeremy Potter. Problem was Mia was only 15-and-a-half, at an age where she wasn't old enough for some things and too old for others. Would Jeremy ever see her the way she saw him?

Guy de Maupassant is considered one of the fathers of the modern short story. His narratives are characterized by an economy of style and the efficient way in which the various threads are neatly resolved. In "The False Jewels", a man who dotes on his wife is crushed by her unexpected death and then astounded by a revelation about her costume jewelry.

Here is one of London's famous stories of the Klondike, where men had to battle the elements, and often each other, to survive.

Against the wishes of superstitious townspeople, Jonathan Harker journeys to the castle of Count Dracula on Walpurgisnacht, the dreaded night of the dead. Abandoned by his frightened coachman, Harker finds himself alone in a cemetery, battered by the elements and at the mercy of the strange beasts hunting him.

Wilkie Collins was the author of two of the greatest mysteries ever written, The Moonstone and The Woman in White. However, like Poe before him and Conan Doyle after, he shifted easily from rational domains to the "superrational". Like them, he often preferred to indulge his occult predilection, a lifelong interest. "The Dream Woman" is one his most anthologized stories of the supernatural.

This is a short story about a ruthless, bloodthirsty, raw-brain-eating pigeon possessed by an evil witch doctor. The beast momentarily tormented the city of Chicago, and this is its tale.

Alice Lethbury, a young wife stuck in a dull, passionless marriage, decides to adopt a baby, Jane, with the consent of her reluctant husband. As Jane grows up, it becomes clear that she has entered the Lethburys' lives for a reason.

A sentry falls asleep at his post, leading to dire consequences. This is a classic tale about the terrible cost of the Civil War, which divided entire families.

Bertie Ross has a few more deliveries to make for Sampson's store before the New Year's holiday. After a delivery at the Forbes' house, Dr. Forbes' daughters invite cold-looking Bertie in to get warm and ask why he isn't wearing mittens. Explaining that he lent them to his sickly brother William John, the sisters hatch a plan to provide a proper New Year's celebration with the Ross brothers and provide them with a little holiday warmth in the meantime.