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: The Dark
2022 Short Fiction Round Up 4
Welcome back it’s time for more great short fiction! This week I’ve got another 5 stories I enjoyed, and think are great and worthy of your time! No single theme happening this week though we do have two stories of revenge, and there is definitely a lot of significant death and tragedy to be had here. It’s not all Doom and Gloom, but there is at least some of that to be sure. I promise though that there are also a lot of moments of human kindness and beauty and helping each other survive the things life can throw at us here too.
One thing I’ve don this week that I’ve never done before is feature two stories from the same magazine. It wasn’t on purpose at first, I was just going through my notes and realized I’d picked out two stories from Strange Horizons. I normally deliberately avoid doing this as I like to spread the recommendations around, but if there was ever a time to highlight two great stories from Strange Horizons now is the time as they are currently in the midst of their annual fund drive. Strange Horizons is a wonderful magazine that provides not only great international short speculative fiction, but poetry, reviews, and critical essays as well. They’re always pushing the envelope and are near-unique in the field. Well worth your support if you’re able.
But now, let’s get to the stories!
Continue reading2021 Short Fiction Round Up 6
A couple days later than I originally planned but the 6th Round Up of Short SFF Fiction of the year is here! Quite a bit of darkness in these stories this week but also a lot of hope. There is also a lot of gorgeous writing and striking imagery and I think there are plenty of little pieces of these stories that will haunt you in the best way. A lot of stories on the longer side than much of what I’ve been featuring here lately, including the longest story of the year for the round up so far: our first novelette of the year!
“A Remembered Kind of Dream” by Rei Rosenquist from GigaNotoSaurus
Take a Mad Max post-apocalypse vibe and mix in your favorite mind-and-or-memory bending story (Inception, Vanilla Sky, or Memento for example) and you’ll have a pretty good comparable for this intriguing novelette. The setting is a really good (and terrifyingly creative) take on a nearish-to-medium future post-apocalypse, one where the world has been largely abandoned to being an ecological horror wasteland and those who remain scrounge and scavenge to get by as best they can. The story starts in a way that feels pretty familiar for such a style – with the go-it-alone nomad finding themselves throwing in with a small group of survivors against their better judgement. As it goes on though, author Rei Rosenquist adds layer after layer of complexity and intrigue (or perhaps I should say they reveal those layers) until we are left with a great blending of genres and something more hopeful than I expected.
(Note: while the story does not have a lot of the nastier things that post-apocalypse stories can go in for, there is a scene of gruesomeness and eventual death that is not malicious, but definitely potentially stomach churning and disturbing all the same.)
Continue reading2021 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 14
Well, damn. The last two weeks have been pretty busy for me so these story recs are coming out much later than I had planned. Luckily, a good story is a good story and these lists are never intended to only cover stories from the week they’re published anyway. No particular theme cropped up this time, though a majority of the stories involve mothers and daughters in some way, and a lot of them get dark and unsettling. We do have a mix of tones though, and some really interesting things going on in these stories. I hope you check them out and find some things here you enjoy too. Continue reading
Weekly Fiction Rec Roundup 10
The Roundup hits it’s 10th installment! Five stories again this week. We have some darkness, some fun, some serious looks at both the evil in our history and our potential future (but with a side of hope), and lots of weird! Continue reading