Victorian Hauntings

Short Stories by Jane Steen

I'm a big fan of short stories from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an era when newspaper circulation boomed and there was a huge popular demand for short-form entertainment. E.F. Benson's The Room in the Tower (1912), E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops (1909) and just about anything by Maupassant and O. Henry spring to mind as my favorites, but there are many more great ones. Most of the ones I like best have a supernatural element.

Every so often a subject for a short story pops into my head, and since it's now possible to publish short stories easily as ebooks, I do just that. My short stories are very different from my novels, and allow me to explore a darker, drier, subtler side of my writing brain.

Available as ebooks in all major online stores.

The Unforgotten

The fog that rolled in off Lake Michigan that November morning was not an unusual phenomenon. But when Peter finished buttoning his coat to ward off the chill, he realized he was no longer alone in the lakeside cemetery. Was his past catching up with him?

The Bars of the Marshalsea

The ghost of Charles Dickens is restless. Eternity is so long, and the world has changed in ways he finds hard to accept. His thoughts take him to his first real home on Doughty Street in London, where he encounters another spirit—a small boy with the unmistakable stamp of poverty upon him. A boy from his own time, and one who has clearly claimed the right to haunt the home where Dickens knew the first taste of success.

But why? The answer to Dickens’ question is in the attic, and will confront the shade of one of the best-loved authors in the English language with a secret he’s kept all his life.