Search YouTube for revenge stories and you will find hour-long narrations with titles like "My Mother-In-Law Evicted Me After the Funeral." Some of those channels have more than a hundred thousand subscribers, and people listen while they fold laundry or drive. What is harder to find is the same kind of story written down, short enough to read over a cup of coffee and free to read on one page.
That is what this list is. Seven family revenge stories from our Revenge Stories shelf, each about twelve minutes long. They are fiction, and they follow the same rules. A woman everyone underestimated keeps the proof. Nobody gets hurt, nothing illegal happens, and the person who wronged her finds out in front of the people whose opinion he cared about.
How we chose them
We started from what readers opened most on the shelf in the past two weeks; it holds more than seventy stories. We left out the four we wrote about in an earlier post, then filled out the list so the people doing the wronging were not all the same: a brother, a son, a mother-in-law, a sister-in-law, a husband, a coworker and a business rival.
They are grouped that way, by who did the wronging, because that is usually how readers choose. Some days you want the brother, and some days the mother-in-law.
1. The brother who said it was a gift
Money after a parent dies is where a lot of these stories start, and this one starts in the produce aisle. Two weeks after the funeral luncheon, the narrator's brother Vinny calls to say their mother gave him the last $80,000 of her savings before she died. A third of that money was hers under the will.
Vinny has one problem. His sister spent thirty years as a bank teller, cashing their mother's fifty-dollar check every Friday, and she knows what their mother's money habits looked like. The proof, as the title tells you, was on the bank's drive-thru camera.
Read My Brother Claimed Our Mother's Last $80,000 Was a Gift. About 12 minutes.
2. The son who said it was just business
This is the one for mothers. Thomas tells his widowed mother he needs $50,000 to save his late father's hardware store from a cheating partner, and she is ready to hand over nearly all of her husband's insurance money before he finishes asking.
Then one of her husband's prized antique tools turns up in a pawn shop. The answer is not in her son's balance sheets. It is in the workshop her husband left behind, where she knows every secret.
Read "It's Just Business, Mom," My Son Said About the $50,000. About 12 minutes.
3. The mother-in-law and the fountain pen
Six months after Gloria's husband dies, his mother produces a codicil that leaves her the family beach house and lists it for $450,000. She says it was his final wish.
Gloria was married to Daniel for thirty-five years. She knows he signed anything that mattered with one particular fountain pen, and the signature on the codicil was not written with it. If you came looking for mother-in-law stories, start here.
Read My Mother-in-Law Stole Our Beach House With a Forged Will. About 12 minutes.
4. The sister-in-law and the bakery
Irene Novak has run The Rolling Pin in Linden Creek, Pennsylvania, alone since her husband died a year ago. She lives above the shop. The building belongs to the family trust, and her sister-in-law Susan is the trustee.
Susan slides a check for $10,000 across the counter, next to a tray of cinnamon rolls, and gives her ninety days to get out. She thinks Irene is just a baker. Irene kept her late husband's receipts.
Read My Sister-in-Law Tried to Evict Me From My Own Bakery. About 11 minutes.
5. The husband and the bad investments
After forty-five years of marriage, Maura and Phil are selling the family home and buying a condo. The lender wants proof of funds by the end of the month, and the retirement account holds far less than forty-five years of saving should have left.
Phil says it was bad investments, and the '68 Mustang he sold at a loss. Maura spent her career as a legal receptionist, which means she knows how to read a paper trail. This is the quietest story on the list, and the one most readers will recognize from their own kitchen tables.
Read My Husband Said His Bad Investments Cost Us Our Retirement. About 11 minutes.
6. The younger colleague and the GPS
Not every revenge story is about family. The narrator has driven the same city bus routes for twenty-eight years and is three years from a full pension. Then Barry Temple, a new driver half her age, files a complaint saying she drives recklessly, and tells the manager the GPS will back him up.
He picked the one record that could also sink him. She knows her routes down to the second, and she brought a folder.
Read "The GPS Will Back Me Up," My Younger Colleague Said. About 12 minutes.
7. The rival next door
For twenty years the narrator ran The Scruffy Mutt, a dog grooming shop on the square in Three Peaks, Wyoming. Then a chrome-and-glass pet spa opens next door with a neon paw in the window and a banner promising half off the first groom. In his first week, the new owner takes $800 in bookings from her.
She was ready to ride it out. The proof that he was a fraud turned up in the coat of a prize-winning miniature poodle named Colette. This is the lightest story here, and a good one to read first if you have never tried the genre.
Read He Opened a Fancy Pet Salon Next Door to Ruin Me. About 12 minutes.
Why revenge stories are better read than watched
The narrated versions on YouTube often run close to an hour. A written story can do something a narration cannot: let you go back. When the proof turns up, you can scroll up and find the line where she first noticed it, which in these stories is usually something she has known for decades because of the work she did.
They are also short. Every story on this list takes about twelve minutes, so you can finish one before the coffee goes cold and decide whether you want another.
If you liked one, try the next
- If the in-law stories are your favorite, read the mother-in-law and the sister-in-law back to back. Both women win with paperwork the other side forgot existed.
- If it is the money stories, pair the brother with the husband. Both are about numbers that do not add up, told by women who spent their careers around numbers.
- If you want something lighter, go from the groomer to the bus driver. Neither one is about family, and both have a satisfying public ending.
Where to find more
Every story we have filed under Revenge Stories is free to read, start to finish, on one page, with no account needed. The most-read of them in the past two weeks is My Husband Took a Reverse Mortgage Out on Our House, which ends at a Christmas Eve dinner.
If you want to know why this kind of story works so well, our post on the everyday moments behind revenge stories looks at the small dismissals they all start from.
