“A dog is found murdered at a hunting club. Then the club’s Swedish cook is killed. More deaths follow. The brutal murders appear to be the work of a werewolf. So goes the plot of Murder at Full Moon, an unpublished novel by John Steinbeck, who received the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature.”
—“A Young John Steinbeck's Unpublished Werewolf Novel Isn't Going To Print,” NPR, May 28, 2021
Pearl Buck: A woman hikes across rural China. Nobody notices that she’s white except for a talking tiger, who tries to explain the difference between appreciation and appropriation.
Rudyard Kipling: Shape-shifting lizard aliens colonize the Earth. A young orphan joins the human resistance and discovers that his dad was a lizard.
George Bernard Shaw: A professor gives lessons to a poor flower girl. She bewitches him to list her as lead author on his Nature paper and lands a tenure-track position at a very competitive community college.
Albert Camus: During a coffee break at his dead-end office job, Sisyphus discovers that the world has been overrun by demons. He returns to his cubicle and ponders suicide.
Ernest Hemingway: A great mako shark pursues a fisherman to a beach town. Many die. The fisherman slays the shark. There is blood, but also glory. The fisherman dies. (Editorial note: No, this isn’t Jaws.)
Naguib Mahfouz: Three generations of a Cairo family feud with an introverted jinn who just wants to be left alone with his book.
J. M. Coetzee: A boy who may or may not be Jesus battles racist zombies.
Orhan Pamuk: An immortal clown stalks the streets of Istanbul and tries to romance a redheaded woman several hundred years his junior. She’s uninterested.
Jean-Paul Sartre: Lucifer tricks a man into ordering a bad batch of escargots.
William Faulkner: A poor white man leaves rural West Virginia to seek his fortune and ends up becoming the Vampire King of Mississippi.
Samuel Beckett: Two men awaiting a third discuss a variety of philosophical matters. He finally arrives and tries to eat them.
Kazuo Ishiguro: A forgetful narrator recalls the day a giant sea monster ravaged postwar Nagasaki. The narrator turns out to be the monster.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: An unnamed apprentice sorcerer in an unnamed Latin American country fails to hex his rival in love, abandons a career in magic, becomes a dictator with American backing, imprisons his ex’s now-husband, dies, and returns as a ghost 120 years later to hook up with her great-granddaughter.
Toni Morrison: A woman kills her baby rather than give it up to the monsters pursuing her. (Editorial note: This one was published. Our bad.)