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):
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2021 Short Fiction Round Up 3
It’s week 3 for the Short Fiction Roundup here in 2021 and I am so happy that this week I’m kicking off the recommendations with stories from two magazines that have never been featured here before.
Constelación is a brand new bilingual speculative fiction magazine that will publish quarterly and all of it’s content will be published in both Spanish and English. Fusion Fragment started publishing last year and is on its fourth issue. I’m a big fan of the design and overall approach of this magazine. It’s a gorgeous presentation and has wonderful innovations such as key word tags for each story, and book recommendations from each author in the issue.
Stories from Flash Fiction Online, Escape Pod, and Tor.com round out the Round Up.
So I can’t lie. When deciding which story from Constelación to read first I looked over it’s content warning page1A feature I think every magazine should employ. Some do. But all should. and I chose the one that had none. That’s the kind of story I wanted at that particular moment – something to get lost in without thorns to have to be wary of and that is exactly what I got! A lovely, fascinating story with an ending that snuck up and knocked me over with how perfect it was. The theme of this first issue of Constelación is “The bonds that unite us” and this story takes it that to a very literal extreme as it follows a researcher visiting a foreign country to learn more of their legendary Beasts: kaiju-like creatures that are created by a merging of a team of humans. Some of the people of Denesk join together to become large sea serpents to protect and manage it’s harbour, others make giant kestrels to deliver messages and some are huge badgers to meet the digging needs of construction and well-making. Along with the ending, that feels as eye-opening for me as a reader as it does for our protagonist, I particularly enjoyed what the story is getting at about community. I also loved the very real feeling and layered-with-nuance view the story gives of someone exploring and trying to understand a culture not their own, and how often it is the outsider’s own cultural baggage and assumptions that can cause barriers where none would otherwise exist. Altogether, a great story with a home run use of worldbuilding.
Continue reading2020 Short Fiction Roundup 3
Welcome once more to a Short Fiction Roundup of some stories I’ve enjoyed reading in the last week or so and hope you might too. As always if you do enjoy any of these stories yourself I hope you’ll consider giving them and the places that publish them a shout out. It’s a great way to support short fiction. These roundups are pretty simple. I cast about for stories to read and when I find one I like I put it in the roundup. Often though, I look over them when I’m done and realize an inadvertent theme has emerged. This week I’d say if there is such a theme I didn’t plan for but see now I’d say it was endings. I can’t promise every story fits under that broad umbrella, but it does seem like many of these tales talk of coming to the end of a story.
Continue reading2019 Short Fiction Roundup 1
It’s been awhile, but the short fiction roundup is back! I’ve been mulling over this one for awhile and finally realized I needed to just pull the trigger and put it out there. Only four stories this time, but it’s better to share four good stories with you than none. And to start rebuilding that momentum so 2019 can be a great year of reading and sharing short fiction. So take a look below, and enjoy!
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