Dodo Collections brings you another classic from W.W. Jacobs, ‘The Monkey's Paw’.
“The Monkey's Paw” is a supernatural short story by author W. W. Jacobs first published in England in 1902.nIn the story, three wishes are granted to the owner of the monkey's paw, but the wishes come with an enormous price for interfering with fate.
A great number of novels, stories, movies, plays and comics are variations or adaptations of the story, featuring similar plots built around wishes that go awry in macabre ways, occasionally with references to monkey's paws or to the story itself. The story is frequently parodied on television shows and in comic books.
William Wymark “W. W.” Jacobs (8 September 1863 — 1 September 1943) was an English author of short stories and novels. Although much of his work was humorous, he is most famous for his horror story “The Monkey's Paw”.
Jacobs is now remembered for his macabre tale “The Monkey's Paw” (published 1902 in the collection of short stories The Lady of the Barge) and several other ghost stories, including “The Toll House” (published 1909 in the collection of short stories Sailors' Knots) and “Jerry Bundler” (published 1901 in the collection Light Freights). However, the majority of his output was humorous in tone. His favorite subjects were marine life: “men who go down to the sea in ships of moderate tonnage” said Punch, reviewing his first collection of stories, Many Cargoes, which achieved great popular success on its publication in 1896. Michael Sadleir described Jacobs' fiction thus: “he wrote stories of three kinds; describing the misadventures of sailor-men ashore; celebrating the artful dodger of a slow-witted village; and tales of the macabre”.
John Drinkwater described Jacobs' fiction as being “in the Dickens tradition”
