


What is The Monkey's Paw About and Why Should I Care? Here is a video about Arabian Nights as well if you wanted to know where the Monkey and the Paw came from. Okay, now are you ready to read "The Monkey's Paw"? As with stories from Stephen King or any good horror writer, the infusion of a little humor makes the scary parts even scarier. This is why you might detect some humor running between the lines of this spooky tale. In his day, Jacobs was known as a writer of comedies. Jacobs would be happy if you did.įrom reading "The Monkey's Paw" you might get the idea that Jacobs wrote mostly horror stories, like Edgar Allan Poe. This story is so good that when you read it, it might inspire you to write or film your own scary (or funny) story based on it – and we bet W.W. Then there's the Simpsons episode "Monkey's Paw,", which is a Simpsonesque retelling of this story. Stephen King's bestselling novel Pet Sematary, the nightmare-inducing story of a cemetery that has the power to bring animals (and maybe even people) back to life, is directly inspired by Jacobs' story. "The Monkey's Paw" may be less well known to modern readers than some of the stories it inspired. One Thousand and One Nights is most famous for the character of Aladdin, which you probably know in its fabulously Disney-fied form. Arabian Nights), a very famous collection of stories from the Middle East and South Asia. "The Monkey's Paw" is an adaptation of another story of three wishes gone wrong, from One Thousand and One Nights (a.k.a. Even the most famous author of all – Big Willy Shakespeare – borrowed almost all of his ideas from other stories and changed them around to create his masterpieces. Most writers are influenced and inspired by the books they themselves read. It was also adapted by another master of horror and suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, for an episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. Over the next century it would find its way into dozens of anthologies and be required reading for thousands of school kids.


That same year it was also published in a collection of Jacobs's short stories called Our Lady of the Barge. Jacobs managed to make a good living writing novels and short stories, but he's most famous for this one, written in 1902 and first published in Harper's magazine. You know, read while sitting around a campfire, or on a dark and story night, when you're all alone. We warn you, this is a scary story, so you might want to do it to the max. " The Monkey's Paw" is the story of the White family and what happens to them when they get a mystical, magical monkey's paw that has the power to grant three wishes.
