Novella Workshop: Can You Identify The Author?

Some of the most famous works of fiction ever written are novellas. And, some not-so-famous works of fiction are novellas, too 🙂 –including those written by authors from Cruciform Press.

Since a novella has limited words to set a scene and establish characters, we could expect to see a great economy of expression in the opening lines of novellas. Can you identify the novella and author for each of these opening lines of novellas?

The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to say that it was the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child. The case, I may mention, was that of an apparition in just such an old house as had gathered us for the occasion—an appearance, of a dreadful kind, to a little boy sleeping in the room with his mother and waking her up in the terror of it; waking her not to dissipate his dread and soothe him to sleep again, but to encounter also, herself, before she had succeeded in doing so, the same sight that had shaken him. It was this observation that drew from Douglas—not immediately, but later in the evening—a reply that had the interesting consequence to which I call attention. Someone else told a story not particularly effective, which I saw he was not following. This I took for a sign that he had himself something to produce and that we should only have to wait. We waited in fact till two nights later; but that same evening, before we scattered, he brought out what was in his mind. [1]

‘What's it going to be then, eh?'
     That was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry. [2]

Everybody said he looked like a haunted man. Who could have seen his hollow cheek; his sunken brilliant eye; his black-attired figure, indefinably grim, although well-knit and well-proportioned; his grizzled hair hanging, like tangled seaweed, about his face—as if he had been, through his whole life, a lonely mark for the chafing and beating of the great deep of humanity—but might have said he looked like a haunted man?[3]

Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the popholes.[4]

On those cloudy days, Robert Neville was never sure when sunset came, and sometimes they were in the streets before he could get back. [5]

I lay awake in my bed for months wishing I would die, and one night I actually did. At least that’s what I think happened. Whether you believe that, or anything else I tell you in this book, is up to you. But remember that “truth is stranger than fiction” sometimes, or if you prefer to think of this as a made-up story, “truth is no stranger to fiction.” Either way I hope you’ll be able to get a sideways view of the truth, as C. S. Lewis called it, by hearing what I have to tell you.[6]

One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug. He lay on his armour-hard back and saw, as he lifted his head up a little, his brown, arched abdomen divided up into rigid bow-like sections. From this height the blanket, just about ready to slide off completely, could hardly stay in place. His numerous legs, pitifully thin in comparison to the rest of his circumference, flickered helplessly before his eyes.[7]

So my dad always told me, from the time I was little, that a woman reached the full bloom of her beauty at age sixteen. Of course that led to another discussion about being perfect in heaven. And if someone died before that time, would they be sixteen forever in heaven? Or on the other hand, did all old women regress to age sixteen at the pearly gates? (But Dad usually chickened out on that one—I think the idea of all teenagers in heaven made him nervous.) [8]

During an interval in the Melvinski trial in the large building of the Law Courts the members and public prosecutor met in Ivan Egorovich Shebek's private room, where the conversation turned on the celebrated Krasovski case. Fedor Vasilievich warmly maintained that it was not subject to their jurisdiction, Ivan Egorovich maintained the contrary, while Peter Ivanovich, not having entered into the discussion at the start, took no part in it but looked through the *Gazette* which had just been handed in.[9]

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.

In the first forty days a boy had been with him.

But after forty days without a fish the boy’s parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week.[10]

The curtains are drawn tight across the window and just a bit of light filters around the edges to catch the side of my face. My eyes crack open and I am momentarily confused. It takes me a second to remember where I am, but I don’t panic. This happens often enough that I’m used to it.[11]

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.[12]

The answers to this quiz are in the footnotes. How did you do?

Latayne C. Scott is the author of over two dozen books published by Christian publishers. Her Mona Lisa Mirror Mystery, from Cruciform Press, is the first installment in the “Into the Art” novella series. Recently her novel, A Conspiracy of Breath (TSU Press), won three international literary awards.

[1] (Henry James, Turn of the Screw)

[2] (Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange)

[3] (Charles Dickens, Haunted Man, abridged by Dave Swaveley)

[4] (George Orwell, Animal Farm)

[5] (Richard Matheson, I am Legend)

[6] (Dave Swaveley, Next Life)

[7] (Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, translated by Ian Johnston)

[8] (Latayne C. Scott, The Mona Lisa Mirror Mystery)

[9] (Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych)

[10] (Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea)

[11] (Ernie Bowman, The Legend of the Wapa)

[12] (H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds)