Fairy Tale Spotlight: Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes [Short Story Review]

[I do not spoil the ending of the story.]

"Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes" is a short story written by Harlan Ellison. It was published in 1967. This is a ghost story! I actually have not read hardly any ghost stories in my life. That is to say that I have read stories that have had ghosts in them, but they were not themed entirely around the ghost.

I'll just come out and say it. This is a story about a haunted slot machine at a casino. That's just what it is. And the man who plays it just keeps winning over and over again. That's the fantasy of it. Imagine if you had the angry ghost of a woman inside a slot machine who was messing with the gears so that it would always produce a jackpot. The better question would be: Should you actually be playing this particular machine?!

The ghost, I believe, was a woman named Maggie who was down on her luck. She plays the machine right as she dies. She then, of course, haunts the machine. I do want to say that the author wrote up one of the most compelling, striking, and fun descriptions of this woman before she dies. It packed a huge punch. I even laughed a bit at how almost jazzy the portrayal was. It had a beatnik feel to it, and I liked it.

The main character, a guy named Koster, ends up making a ton of money of this machine. Every time the bars would come up, there was a pair of pretty eyes in between them. Imagine that! It would be a very surreal thing to go through, and the author here paints the scene out so well.

I won't spoil the ending, but I just know that you are going to love it. It's good. It's scary. It's a great ending to a really well-written ghost story. I do recommend it, and I would also like to remark that this was a good story for how it was written, but not necessarily what it was written about. Harlan's fun presentation is why this short story is so good. Give it a try! You'll find it very hard to put down.

This blog was written on July 15, 2024.

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