Well it’s Halloween (or All Hallow’s Eve, or Samhain, or even All Saint’s Eve for some) and it’s the climax of spooky season so I figured what better way to celebrate than an all horror round up of some short speculative fiction I’ve been reading and enjoying lately. I don’t recommend too much horror usually (though I do some, and do recommend a fair bit of dark stories), though I do enjoy it quite a lot. I simply feel that horror is hard to recommend broadly because by it’s very nature it is likely to be upsetting or uncomfortable to some, if not many, and require a fair bit of caveats. Tis the spooky season though, so it is the perfect time to go all in on the genre. I will try to call out specific content warnings for each story, and not all are equally disturbing or disturbing in the same ways (and that of course is a completely subjective opinion – the problem with horror!), but please consider this fair warning. Otherwise, if you’d like to cap off the season of celebrating ghosts and goblins and the macabre I have some great suggestions for you (with apologies to any authors who don’t consider their recommended stories to be horror, I feel that all the below are at the least horror-adjacent enough to fit a Halloween themed round up):
Continue readingTag Archives: Nightmare Magazine
2021 Short Fiction Round Up 2
The roundup returns with 5 more stories I’d like to share with you. 5 things I read this week and enjoyed. There is a lot of dark and horror on the slate this week but there is also some pure fun and funny of the light hearted and macabre sort. Every story this week is available to read for free, though I always encourage you to support your favorite magazines when and if you can. By word of mouth for stories you particularly like if nothing else. Now, on with the recommendations!
“There, in the Woods” by Clara Madrigano from The Dark #68
Kicking things off with a good old ‘there is something in the woods’ story. It’s grim (though not gruesome) and the weight of near-hopelessness descends by the end but the story drew me in, much like the woods our protagonist lives by, and I found myself wanting to stay with it to the end. After, as I thought more and more about the story of Lucy and the creepy land and forest that has taken her parents, her husband, and a local boy she didn’t even know I found myself trying to decide if she had been fated to some kind of doom from the moment, as a child, when her parents moved the family to their new house by the woods, or from the moment she let herself fall for her husband Nick. Perhaps one led, in an inevitable sort of way, to the other. “There, in the Woods” feels like, as Chuck Wendig has described Paul Tremblay’s writing, “supernatural-adjacent” horror and it is the parts of the story that would be unsettling even if there weren’t something in the woods that will likely leave you thinking over the story again later.
Continue readingWeekly Fiction Rec Roundup 13
If this week’s Round Up has a theme it might be best described as stories I don’t/can’t 100% understand.1Like all my makeshift, and always made in hindsight, themes this one does not apply to *every* story in the Round Up. That might sound like a pretty silly theme or one not to recommend itself too well, but it absolutely should not reflect on the stories or be taken as judgement on their quality.
The idea that all good stories should be universal, that they should somehow be of equal appeal, or equally accessible, to any reader is one I don’t believe in. Such an idea relies upon a belief in a universal common experience that is far more unhealthy myth than reality, and often a result of a failure, usually by people in societal majorities, to understand that there are experiences separate from their own. But, to paraphrase something I said in the 11th Round Up: If you’re going to read widely, and I think you should, you’re going to read things for which you aren’t the intended primary audience and which you may not “get” in the same way or to the same extent as someone who is. That’s OK. That’s good even. The world is so much more than our own familiar comfort zones, and so much better for it.
Now, on with the stories! Continue reading
Weekly Fiction Rec Roundup 5
I’m coming in a day later than usual and with only 5 stories this time, but it is time for another roundup of fiction I’ve recently read and liked enough to share on my Mastodon feed. I think there’s an interesting selection here with a series of styles that range from feeling like they could have come from a different era (the 2nd and last story) to the thoroughly modern (like the first story). As usual there’s a fair bit of weird and creepy and unsettling, but not only that. And, as usual I think there’s hope to be found here too.
Weekly Fiction Rec Roundup 2
As mentioned last week I’m trying to read at least one short story a day, and, if I like it I’m signal boosting it on Mastodon (If I don’t like it I’m sharing a favorite story I’ve read before). Every week I’m gathering those recommendations here in a weekly roundup.
Here are the stories I shared this week: