Halloween Reading: "In the Penal Colony" by Franz Kafka

A Traveler has arrived at a penal colony to observe a strange manner of execution: a device that takes twelve hours to kill the offender. Its biggest proponent, an Officer still loyal to an old regime, fanatically explains the devices's intricacies while preparing a Condemned Man for slaughter. Then, he reveals his plan to implicate the Traveler in its further operation.

No stranger to existential horror, this is Franz Kafka's most viscerally upsetting story. "In the Penal Colony" brings a twisted Saw-like sense of justice and clockwork machinery into contact with his normal domain of fussy clerks and bureaucrats who exist to reveal religious epiphanies but never experience them for themselves.

Other Halloween Readings:

• "The Repairer of Reputations" by Robert W. Chambers
• "This Band Could Be Your Life" by Gary Butterfield
• "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• "The Mask" by Robert W. Chambers
• "The Tower" by Marghanita Laski
• "The Prodigy of Dreams" by Thomas Ligotti
• "In the Court of the Dragon" by Robert W. Chambers