With a title like "Death in the Woods," you might think we're about to read the sequel to The Blair Witch Project, or you accidentally picked up an album by some terrible '80s metal band (wait, we thought this was a book…).

Fortunately for us, "Death in the Woods" is simply a killer short story from American legend Sherwood Anderson. Anderson was actually a bit of a late-bloomer—he didn't publish his first novel, Windy McPherson's Son, until he was forty years old. In fact, Anderson was a successful businessman long before he started writing, and it was only a nervous breakdown that caused him to commit himself to becoming an author. The short story "Death in the Woods" is actually one of his later works, written in the late 1930s.

"Death in the Woods" is a simple tale about an old woman who's had one tough life. She lives with her abusive husband and bratty son outside a small town, but the two men are always traveling and getting up to no good. That leaves her alone to take care of the house and visit town to buy food. As the title implies, the old woman never makes it home from one of those trips.

Seems simple, right? But Anderson adds an extra layer of intrigue to the situation by using an unreliable narrator to tell the story. This is like adding sprinkles and hot fudge to the top of a sundae—it makes things way better. It's actually quite fitting, too, because much of the story's plot is culled from Anderson's real-life experiences.

So forget about sequels to classic '90s horror films; ignore that annoying metal band that your dad probably used to listen to; sit down, relax, and see for yourself what's waiting in the woods.

Memory is a tricky thing.

Let's put it this way—how real are the photographs you see in magazines? Pictures are supposed to be exact replicas of reality, but most cover-shots have been retouched and edited so much that they almost seem like they came from another dimension. In an attempt to make their models look better, the magazine editors end up making them look weird beyond belief.

Memory works in a similar way. Often, we think of memories as indisputable facts . Yeah, right. Over time, memories have a tendency to change their shape for a variety of reasons: to repress bad experiences, to fit in line with new information, or to simply rewrite history.

"Death in the Woods" is all about this bizarre concept. What seems like a simple story about a simple old lady has tons to say about our relationship with our own brains. There's more than meets the eye in "Death in the Woods"—you're just going to have to do a little digging to figure out what.