Previous | Next What a beautiful, tragic human tale Nadia Bongo tells! "Born a Ghost" follows a small ghost girl's life from birth until her twelfth year. This story is a kind of ontology of the ghostly life across this period, a magical tale that hides reality under a thin layer of fiction. It's not... Continue Reading →
Previous | Next This psychological horror packs the punch of peak Stephen King, and its subject matter is reminiscent of the master storyteller's own interests. A strange, religious obsession befalls the dads of Will's new friends, transforming them, turning them violent and cruel. Will's no hero, he's just arrived to town after his own share... Continue Reading →
Previous | Next Whereas a previous Apex Magazine #141 piece drew the image of Medusa into a starkly feminist context, this piece by Liv Strom romanticises the innate tragedy to the mythological figure. Mirroring is a theme the text takes up with skill, though I don't want to tell you much about, save that the... Continue Reading →
Previous | Next Guilt is a bitter pill to swallow. Normally, I'd write something flippant after this, say, "Not as bitter as acid, but still." Only, I can't, because Leah Ning's haunting piece about guilt - and the inability to live with it - makes a persuasive case about just how acrimonious a taste this... Continue Reading →
Previous | Next Who'd have thought that stopping the zombie apocalypse would be rewarded with little but misery? This is what Saul does: he, a security guard, takes out his weapon and "puts down" (the comparison is made by one character in the story) two researchers, infected by a compound that would've jump-started the end... Continue Reading →
Previous | Next What if women didn't have to be afraid of men? What if they had a way to protect themselves from those predators who hide among us and strike at the vulnerable at their weakest? This short epistolary piece, less than two thousand words in length, examines the aftermath of a world in... Continue Reading →
Previous | Next Once you start E. Catherine Tobler's 4,500-word piece, your first instinct might be to think you've come across a transcript to an unaired episode of an Extreme Makeover spin-off show. That initial impression is quick to dissipate before the identity of another genre asserts itself - found footage. Not only that, but... Continue Reading →
Previous | Next J. S. Breukelaar portrays an apocalypse whose horror is two-fold: on the one, the terror of witnessing the world end; on the other, the terror of captivity and servitude to the slimy, hungry creatures that brought about the apocalypse. Justin, the protagonist, has been a cog of a grisly machine for six... Continue Reading →
Previous | Next Elisabeth Ring takes the metaphorical fracturing of the mind and renders it literal in this thousand-word-long flash piece. Our protagonist lives with Ivan, he of the tick-tick-ticking heart. The ticking sound is an unwanted companion and a reminder of his feelings for the protagonist, with Ring illustrating her as fearful of commitment,... Continue Reading →
Previous | Next Victor Forna's story is a triumph. It's the kind of thoughtful narrative about the ways in which stories function that reads as tailor-made for me and my tastes. A mother has to outwit a "kurfi, debul, demon" storyteller from within the latter's own story. Trapped within that story is the mother's son,... Continue Reading →
The Grimoire Reliquary 