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Howard is an avid short story reader who likes to help others find and understand stories.

It's hard to beat a twist ending for pure entertainment value.

Even though a twist ending is supposed to give the reader a jolt, the best ones seem inevitable and seamless. Not all the twists in these stories are sudden, but they will all be surprising in some way.

The stories by Jeffrey Archer are available in his first volume of Collected Short Stories, which has many other stories with twist endings and is a fun read.

Here are some great short stories with surprise endings. The endings aren't revealed here, only the set-ups.

1. "The Interlopers"

2. "Twin Study"

3. "The Open Window"

4. "Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen"

5. "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"

6. "The Lottery"

7. "The Necklace"

8. "The Last Leaf"

9. "Wish You Were Here"

10. "Roman Fever"

11. "A Retrieved Reformation"

12. "Man from the South"

13. "The Lame Shall Enter First"

14. "Barney"

15. "A Continuity of Parks"

16. "Good Country People"

17. "The Story of an Hour"

18. "Reunion"

19. "The Reticence of Lady Anne"

20. "A Horseman in the Sky"

21. "Taste"

22. "Charles"

23. "The Gift of the Magi"

24. "The Landlady"

25. "The Mouse"

26. "Bella Fleace Gave a Party"

27. "Beware of Dog"

28. "The Sniper"

29. "Dear Marsha"

30. "One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts"

31. "Clean Sweep Ignatius"

32. "Appointment with Love"

33. "A Rose for Emily"

34. "The Hounds of Fate"

35. "Harvey's Dream"

36. "Lamb to the Slaughter"

37. "Gold-Mounted Guns"

38. "A Man Who Had No Eyes"

39. "Zoo"

40. "The Painted Door"

41. "The Dowry"

42. "The Wife's Story"

43. "After Twenty Years"

44. "Broken Routine"

45. "To Serve Man"

46. "Ruthless"

47. "Button, Button"

48. "Marjorie Daw"

49. "The Woman at the Store"

50. "The Memento"

51. "Time Enough at Last"

52. "Third from the Sun"

53. "Brothers Beyond the Void"

54. "Four O'Clock"

55. "He-y, Come On Ou-t"

56. "Test"

57. "Jeff Peters as a Personal Magnet"

58. "The Lottery"

59. "Desiree's Baby"

60. "Cheap at Half the Price"

61. "Everyone Talks"

62. "The Dinner Party"

63. "The Bookbinder's Apprentice"

64. "Calling the Shots"

65. "Clockwork"

A young son mourns the loss of his mother, while his unsympathetic father is preoccupied with helping other people. The father invites a young delinquent into their home, who resists his efforts to help.

A dinner host and a wine expert make a bet. If the expert can identify the wine being served, he gets to marry the host's daughter; if he can't, he forfeits both his houses.

During summer vacation, Marsha starts corresponding with a pen pal, Anne Marie. They talk about their difficulties and have a lot in common.

Robert Proctor is out driving with his mother. When another vehicle clips his front fender he struggles to maintain control.

There seems to be more than one published version of this story.

(Simpler version)

Jeff Peters recounts an incident he had while posing as a medicine man. After being shut down by the constable, he meets Andy, a man with a similar trade. They want to go in on something together. Jeff gets an emergency summons from the mayor; he is sick and the local doctor is out of town.
Read "Jeff Peters as a Personal Magnet"

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Howard is an avid short story reader who likes to help others find and understand stories. It's hard to beat a twist ending for pure entertainment value. Even though a twist ending is supposed to give the reader a jolt, the best ones seem inevitable and seamless.

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The Way Up To Heaven, a short story by Roald Dahl

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The Way Up To Heaven, a short story by Roald Dahl

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Another good story with a twist, by Roald Dahl

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Another good story with a twist, by Roald Dahl

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'The Open Window' is one of Saki's shortest stories, and that's saying something. Few of his perfectly crafted and deliciously written tales exceed four or five pages in length, but 'The Open Window', at barely three pages, outstrips even ' The Lumber-Room' or ' Tobermory' for verbal economy. It is so brief it has almost the air of a parable about it, except that it's far from clear what the 'moral' of the story is, or even if there is one. Saki uses language so deftly and to such effect, that it is worth unpicking and analysing 'The Open Window' (which can be read in full here) a little.

Although on first glance it seems different from some of Saki's better-known stories, such as his classic werewolf tale 'Gabriel-Ernest' and his story about a polecat worshipped as a god, 'Sredni Vashtar', 'The Open Window' follows the same essential setup as many of Saki's other stories, in having an adolescent character whose supposed innocence (supposed by the adult character, that is) turns out to be guile, cunning, and the mischief in disguise. But whereas Nicholas in 'The Lumber-Room', Conradin in 'Sredni Vashtar', or Gabriel-Ernest actively seek to cause harm to their adult antagonists (or, in the case of Nicholas, to refuse to help an aunt who has got herself trapped in the water tank), Vera's only weapon is her imagination. Yet this alone suggests that she shares some kinship with Conradin in 'Sredni Vashtar', whose cousin and guardian dislikes her ward's imaginative streak.

What happens in 'The Open Window', in summary, is this: a man, who has the glorious name of Framton Nuttel, has newly arrived in a 'rural retreat', to help him settle his nerves. His sister, worried that he will hide himself away there and 'mope', thus making his nerves worse, has given him the names and addresses of all the people she knows in the area, and told him to go and introduce himself to them. (His sister had stayed at the rectory four years earlier.) 'The Open Window' takes place at the house of one of Framton's sister's contacts, a woman named Mrs Sappleton and her 15-year-old niece, Vera, whom Framton has gone round to visit so he might introduce himself.

While Mrs Sappleton is upstairs making herself ready to meet their new guest, Vera entertains Framton. After she learns that Framton knows barely anything about her aunt, Vera tells him that three years ago Mrs Sappleton's husband and her two brothers went out through the French window on a shooting trip, and never returned. They drowned in a 'treacherous piece of bog' and their bodies were never recovered. The spaniel they took with them was lost, too. Vera tells Framton that her aunt has kept the French window open ever since, in the belief that her husband and brothers are going to walk back through the open window any moment, alive and well.

Mrs Sappleton then arrives from upstairs and apologises for being late coming down. She mentions the open window and explains that her husband and brothers are out shooting but will be back any minute. They exchange small talk about shooting and birds, and Framton iterates that he has been told to have complete rest and avoid 'mental excitement', when Mrs Sappleton announces that her husband and brothers are returning home. Framton looks with horror at the sight of three men and a 'tired brown spaniel' approaching the open window - he sees that Vera shares his look of shock. Believing he is seeing three ghosts (four if you include the dog!), he picks up his hat and coat and runs from the house as fast as he can. Back at the house, Mrs Sappleton remarks that Mr Nuttel was an odd man - all he could do was talk about his ailments, and then he 'dashed off' as soon as the men arrived. Vera suggests that he was scared of dogs, and the sight of the spaniel caused him to run off. The final sentence of the story refers to Vera: 'Romance at short notice was her speciality.'

'The Open Window' is an amusing little story; but is it more than this? Closer analysis of Saki's tale reveals that the devil is in the detail. Note that Framton is not presented as a gullible fool, and if he is, we as readers are encouraged to be gulled, too, for we are supposed to be taken in by Vera's lie about the dead husband and brothers as well. But as Framton is wondering whether Mrs Sappleton is married or widowed, he senses a male presence in the house: 'An undefinable something about the room seemed to suggest masculine habitation.' His first instinct is correct, but Vera's entirely fabricated narrative leads him to believe he was mistaken about the 'masculine' atmosphere.

And she convinces him that she should be believed by a number of subtle details: the spaniel that accompanied the men on their apparently ill-fated trip, for instance, and the white waterproof coat which the husband was carrying over his arm when they left. Vera obviously saw the men leaving with the dog and coat, and weaves them into the narrative she feeds to Framton, so that when the men return - with the dog and the coat, as described - the idea that Framton is seeing dead men walking is all the more powerful. Vera's look of horror when they see the men returning to the house is also a nice touch. Of course, being still technically a child, female, and named Vera (meaning literally 'truth'), all help, too. But you can never trust children in Saki, those 'feral ephebes' in Sandie Byrne's memorable phrase.

But does 'The Open Window' mean anything else beyond itself? That is, can it be analysed as a commentary on anything other than lying teenage girls? Well, the story does raise questions which, we might argue, prefigure the concerns of the modernist writers who were active a few years after Saki, in the immediate post-WWI period. There is no absolute truth or absolute reality, writers such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf suggest, because everything is mediated through personal human experience, and we cannot know everything. Virginia Woolf's first great novel, Jacob's Room (1922), is a good example of this: no one character fully knows or understands the title character, and everyone gets a slightly different glimpse of who he is. Framton has only Vera's word to go on about Mrs Sappleton's husband and brothers. But, conversely, Mrs Sappleton, unaware that her niece has been spinning their guest a web of lies, has a different perception of him, too, believing him to be an odd man who has an excessive reaction to the sight of her male relatives. Vera, the fiction-master (and thus the author-surrogate in the story), is the only one who knows both sides and can enjoy playing these two characters, with their partial glimpses of the whole story, off each other. Although Saki's style and approach are very different from someone like Virginia Woolf, the preoccupation with 'fiction' and 'perception' is the same - only Saki's take on this issue is funnier.

Vera's lie in 'The Open Window' about three members of one family - all of them male - going off together on a shooting trip and never returning, leaving the female characters at home to grieve for them, seems eerily to prefigure the events of a few years later, when hundreds of thousands of Englishmen - including, in many cases, every single man in a particular family - would go off to fight in the First World War and never come back. (When we consider that, in Vera's fictional account, the three men meet their end by drowning in boggy mud, and their bodies are never recovered, the foreshadowing of the Western Front becomes downright spooky.) Saki himself would be one of them, killed in action in 1916. With him, and many like him, the Edwardian way of life that Saki so ruthlessly skewers in his stories would die, too. But 'The Open Window' remains more than a window (to reach for the inevitable metaphor) onto a vanished world. It is a timeless tale about truth and fiction, and, yes, a parable without a moral. For that reason, it deserves to be revisited, analysed and studied, discussed, and celebrated.

You can pick up all of Saki's wonderful stories in the very affordable collection, The Collected Short Stories of Saki (Wordsworth Classics) , and lose yourself in the writing of one of Edwardian literature's wittiest storytellers.

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A Summary and Analysis of Saki's 'The Open Window'

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A reading of H. H. Munro's miniature masterpiece 'The Open Window' is one of Saki's shortest stories, and that's saying something. Few of his perfectly crafted and deliciously written tales exceed four or five pages in length, but 'The Open Window', at barely three pages, outstrips even 'The Lumber-Room' or 'Tobermory' for verbal economy.

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A short film adapted from Saki's short story 👻👻

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Definition

I'm sitting in my home office, and I hear screams trickle down the stairs. The kids are at it again. My daughter is first to reach me, crying about how her brother punched her in the back for no reason. She swears she did nothing to instigate the attack. I look at her with doubtful eyes. I know that there is another side to this story, and that my daughter is an unreliable narrator of the events of this latest skirmish.

First-person narrators are characters within the story telling the events of the plot from their perspective. Sometimes, these characters deviate from the truth or have mental conditions that limit their abilities to tell the story accurately. We call these characters unreliable narrators.

An unreliable narrator is a character whose telling of the story is not completely accurate or credible due to problems with the character's mental state or maturity. Some literary critics argue that there is no such thing as a reliable first-person narrator since every character is affected by his or her past experiences in the telling of a story, but most first-person narrators attempt to give the most accurate version of the events. An unreliable narrator, however, holds a distorted view of the events, which leads to an inaccurate telling of the story. This can give readers or viewers a chance to offer their own interpretations.

The term 'unreliable narrator' was first used by Wayne C. Booth in 1961 in The Rhetoric of Fiction. Since then, many authors and filmmakers use the technique to create interest and suspense in their narration. Some indicators that a narrator is unreliable include contradicting stories, incomplete explanations of events, illogical information, and even questions of the narrator's sanity.

Examples of Unreliable Narrators

Short Stories

Edgar Allan Poe, known for his dark story lines, uses an unreliable narrator in several of his short stories. In 'The Cask of Amontillado', the narrator, Montresor, expresses his anger at being wronged and insulted by Fortunado. Montresor's obsession with revenge and failure to explain exactly how Fortunado harmed him makes him an unreliable narrator because his mental state has affected his decision-making. Montresor lures Fortunado down to his family's catacombs, where he proceeds to bury Fortunado alive.

Novels

In J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, the narrator, Holden Caulfield, admits to being the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. In addition to his tendency to fib to characters that populate the novel, Caulfield's immaturity and overly negative worldview prohibits him from giving an accurate version of events. His unreliability is also made clear in the fact that he is receiving treatment in a mental facility.

Modern Novel Examples

Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl actually uses two unreliable narrators. The book is told through alternating accounts of Nick Dunne and the diary entries of his wife, Amy Dunne. Since their version of events in their struggling marriage conflict, the reader is unsure of which character to trust. It is later revealed that both characters lie, which makes both of them unreliable.

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unreliable narrator: definition & examples - video & lesson transcript | study.com

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Unreliable Narrator: Definition & Examples - Video & Lesson Transcript | Study.com

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I'm sitting in my home office, and I hear screams trickle down the stairs. The kids are at it again. My daughter is first to reach me, crying about how her brother punched her in the back for no reason. She swears she did nothing to instigate the attack.

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'I spy with my little eye...

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is a character whose telling of the story is not completely accurate or credible. An unreliable narrator holds a distorted view of the events, which leads to an inaccurate telling of the story. This can give readers or viewers a chance to offer their own interpretations.

The term 'unreliable narrator' was first used by Wayne C. Booth in 1961 in The Rhetoric of Fiction. Since then, many authors and filmmakers use the technique to create interest and suspense in their narration. Some indicators that a narrator is unreliable include contradicting stories, incomplete explanations of events, illogical information, and even questions of the narrator's sanity.

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Narrators that are not to be trusted

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The unreliable narrator is an odd concept. The way I see it, we're all unreliable narrators of our lives who usually have absolute trust in our self-told stories. Any truth is, after all, just a matter of perspective. The only rule I have in how I let characters tell stories is that they must always tell the reader their version of the truth. No one likes being outright lied to, even in fiction. I don't mind a narrator who's self-deceiving, but the clues for their truth have to be there for the reader to see.

My novel Behind Her Eyes is, on the surface, the story of the three people in a love affair. An affair combined with a marriage built on secrets - which there must be in a thriller - is perfect for creating unreliable narrators. After all, it's in the situations when we're acting at our most shameful - cheating on a partner, sleeping with someone else's partner, or secretly fighting to keep a spouse, that our versions of the truth are the most tenuous. I couldn't help it. I didn't mean to. It just happened. I was going to end it. And that's a fun pit to play in for a writer. Fertile ground, because let's face it, good people make for really dull stories.

There are, of course, different types of unreliable narrators; those who are fooling themselves, those who are fooling others, and a range in between. Here are a few of the ones that stand out for me.

1. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
The fabulously unpleasant tale of Amy and Nick's marital problems breathed new life into the psychological thriller. The twist wasn't what I loved most about this book - it was the slow reveals in the first section from Nick about himself, that turned him from immediate protagonist to somewhat tarnished hero.

2. Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
Unreliable narrators go hand in hand with plot twists and never so much as here. When the unnamed, insomniac narrator meets the enigmatic Tyler Durden, the two men start an underground boxing club for men who feel they want to be defined by more than their jobs and pay grades. This becomes Project Mayhem, an army with the aim of bringing the whole system down. A punch of a twist - excuse the pun - reveals both characters to be completely unreliable.

3. The Three by Sarah Lotz
This dark story of four plane crashes and the three children who survive plays with unreliable narration in quite a different way, as diary entries, extracts of a book, news reports and psychiatric reports make up the puzzle pieces of the plot. After seeing events and actions from one character's viewpoint and believing them, Lotz then presents you with another character's version of the same events. Who you can trust, if anyone, is hard to know.

4. The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
Teenager Frank Cauldhame has no National Insurance number, no birth certificate and has been told by his overprotective father to lie should anyone ask who he is. Living on a remote island off Scotland, Frank tells the reader bluntly he had murdered three people by the time he was 10. With an older brother just escaped from a psychiatric institution and a father who keeps his secrets locked away, The Wasp Factory is a darkly disturbing study of a hugely dysfunctional - and unreliable - family.

5. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
In the second Mrs de Winter we have a narrator who is unreliable through no fault of her own because she misunderstands everything about the eerie situation around her, and the reader is misled along with her. Rebecca is a masterclass in the search for secrets at the heart of a marriage as one woman tries to find out what became of her predecessor.

6. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
He's sly, is Humbert Humbert. He flatters the reader, and tries to bring them on side as he talks of his perverse infatuation with a prepubescent girl and attempts to justify his actions. A disgustingly brilliant book.

7. The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
I can hardly believe there is anyone left in the world who hasn't read this yet, but it's hard to beat for unreliable narration. The central character in its clever tale of mistrust and murder is unreliable simply because she's drunk for much of the book and blacks out.

8. The Tell-Tale Heart by Never trust a narrator whose opening gambit is to insist he's not mad. Although only a short story, this is a chilling tale of the effects of guilt on a person's psyche will stay with readers a long time. Is the tell-tale heart really beating, spectrally, beneath the floorboards, or does murder create a hell of its own?

9. Notes on a Scandal by Zoë Heller
From the outset, narrator Barbara's acid tongue and confidence that she is the only one in a position to tell the sordid tale of an art teacher's ill-judged affair with a pupil give the reader the nod that the perspective they are about to get on everyone involved is likely to be skewed.

10. The Life of Pi by Yann Martel
After the boat a young boy was travelling on sinks, he's left in a life raft on the ocean with only a tiger for company. Such a beautiful story, and yet at the end the reader is left to wonder how much is true and how much has been reimagined in order for him to cope with tragedy and the brutal struggle for survival. This narrator's unreliabilty might just break your heart.

Behind Her Eyes by Sarah Pinborough will be published later this month by HarperCollins, priced £12.99. It can be ordered from the Guardian bookshop for £11.04, including free UK p&p.

Topics

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The unreliable narrator is an odd concept. The way I see it, we're all unreliable narrators of our lives who usually have absolute trust in our self-told stories. Any truth is, after all, just a matter of perspective.

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A short story by Jeffrey Archer

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Just good Friends by Jeffrey Archer text .pdf

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Writing Fiction & Poetry : How to Identify Narrative Style in Literature

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Writing Fiction & Poetry : How to Identify Narrative Style in Literature

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Writing Fiction & Poetry : How to Identify Narrative Style in Literature