As the end of the world approaches a wealthy artists’ community, a long-married couple stays with their friends and attends nihilistic, indulgent suicide parties.

A man recalls his intimate friendship with his former English professor, who resolved to fuel his unsatisfied desire for playwriting during the time they were apart. In their reunion decades later, instead of the brilliant play he promised, the professor shows his former student a disturbing product of his mental instability.

After struggling to appeal to their state governor, a dysfunctional family anxiously awaits the public execution of a relative. As they wait at home new of the execution, tensions and strife erupt in a dispute over the relative's innocence.

When Harold's wife dies, seemingly by malicious cause, he becomes the prime suspect. As the public defender investigates her death, he finds that she may have held secrets herself.

As she wanders in and out of forests to escape her past and the boy she feels guilty for wanting, a woman gives birth to and abandons a child she thinks of as the physical embodiment of her sin.

After two of a man's acquaintances die by suicide, he goes on a hunting trip and can't stop thinking about why they wanted to die.

A rambunctious teenager with an inquisitive mind causes much grief for all his New England family and neighbors when he visits them in the summer of 1914, on the eve of World War I.

A recently widowed woman lets a man into her house to look at her fuse box — but soon realizes that the man did not come for the fuse box at all.

A wife leaves her husband in order to ensure his ultimate salvation after they are rejected from the Christian church for their polygamist marriage.

A man wakes up one day and realizes the world has ended, and he is the only survivor. He wanders aimlessly and crashes at another house before encountering a woman, who seems to be the only other survivor.