The impressive short stories in Astray are based on actual historical events. Donoghue, who wrote The Room, is able to get into the minds of countless people from a wide variety of historical periods.
"Man and Boy," which portrays the loving relationship between an elephant and his keeper is based on Wild Animals in Captivity. The story closely follows the actual removal of Jumbo's London Zoo to a circus and the uproar it caused.
"The Widow's Cruse" is loosely based on a journal entry from the Weekly Journal dated May 26, 1735. A widow hoodwinks a man who means to take her fortune.
Some of Donoghue's stories are inspired by her trip to the Sharlot Hall Museum in Prescott, Arizona e.g. "Last Supper at Brown's" and the "The Long Way Home."
The narrator's dramatic dialogues gives readers a keyhole glimpse to history. Its just a keyhole glimpse; We don't see, for instance, the whole of the
Revolutionary War, just the experience of one fifteen-year-old Hessian in "The Hunt" who decides to act villainously.
We don't see the whole slave experience in Texas; we're given instead the story of one man who kills his master and runs away with his mistress ("Last Supper at Brown's"). We're told the lamentable story of a bored daughter whose games and lies lead to the selling of a honest slave-girl, Milly ("Vanitas")
Astray is a powerhouse of a short story collection that is divided into three parts: Departures, In-Transit, Arrivals and Aftermaths.
In Summerlong, a girl called Lionness has uncanny abilities. She smells like meadows, enchants children and calms Orcas. She owns nothing of value and yet she lives rent-free in an older couple's garage.
Abe thinks she looks like Botticelli's Primavera; Joanna, his live-in wife, agrees to let the girl stay in their garage. She worries, though, that her daughter, Lily, will fall in love with Lionnness.
Though they love each other, the couple's relationship is seriously strained when Lionness' husband comes looking for her at the restaurant where she works.
At this point, the novel makes a U-turn. Abe makes love to Lionness, though its never really clear why. He's in his sixties and she is presumably in her twenties but actually something non-human, Queen of the Underworld.
If Abe is unfaithful, Joanna, often called Delvechio, wants to do the same with Mr. Mardikian, who is really the God of the Underworld. First, though, she wants to shoot hoops.
Beagle combines the fantastic with the prosaic in such a superb way that none of it seems outlandish.
Peter Beagle wrote his best known work, The Last Unicorn, while in his twenties.
Set in the eighties, this nostalgic TV series is a horror drama starring Winona Ryder, Matthew Modine and Milly Bobby Brown.
When a local boy, Will, goes missing, his middle school friends poignantly launch their own investigation. Coincidently, A girl with no memories wanders down the same road, Mirkwood, where the local boy disappeared.
She is strong and vulnerable, an interesting contradiction. Mike, one of the kids looking for Will, shelters her in his basement.
Local police believe that Will has fallen into the quarry and accidently drowned. Joyce, the boy's mother, believes she can speak to him through a string of Christmas lights. Naturally, everyone surmises she's gone nuts with grief
For a plot like this, it would be easy for the series to fall into commonplace horror. The monster that chases them in the upside down is fairly classic horror--cobwebs, stickiness, facelessness.
Stranger Things doesn't descend, however, into comic book characterizations. Not all of the bad characters are entirely bad e.g. Steve, nor all of the heroes entirely good e.g. Hopper.
As in every work of horror, there is something terrible in the ordinary. Take nothing for granted, the genre seems to say.
Even the most polished, the most exemplary may be hiding a dark secret. Conversely, even the weakest or the most vulnerable may be strongest.
Some of Donoghue's stories are inspired by her trip to the Sharlot Hall Museum in Prescott, Arizona e.g. "Last Supper at Brown's" and the "The Long Way Home." 
