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 →
The Short Story Reader #127 – Spread the Word by Delilah S. Dawson
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 →
The Short Story Reader #125 – Dandelions by Martin Cahill
Previous | Next What happens when strangers from the stars come and their physiology interplays with ours in so unique a way as to invite nothing but murder. Martin Cahill's "Dandelions" is a flash piece that offers a refreshing reimagining of the alien invasion. Never mind that was exactly what they wanted to happen, what... Continue Reading →
The Short Story Reader #124 – Morag’s Boy by Fiona Moore
Previous | Next Once upon a time, some four months ago, I reviewed a little story by Fiona Moore called "The Spoil Heap". Imagine my shock when the very first story in Clarkesworld #207 is a standalone sequel, once more featuring my favourite postapocalyptic techie Morag! Now older, Morag is asked by her family to... Continue Reading →
The Short Story Reader #123 – Maladaptive Camouflage by Ann LeBlanc
Previous | Next I discovered "Maladaptive Camouflage" thanks to a tweet by Angela Liu (whose excellent story "The Last Gamemaster in the World" I reviewed last week). What a great find this short story is--a blending of first and second-person narrative at a critical moment in three people's lives. One of them, at first glance,... Continue Reading →
The Short Story Reader #121 – The Last Gamemaster in the World by Angela Liu
The Last Gamemaster in the World by Angela Liu examines the mother-child dynamic in a beautiful, fresh way through the lens of games at the end of the world - find out this and more in my short examination of the short story.
The Short Story Reader #117 – Homecoming by Wen Yu Yang
Previous | Next A skeleton pig dreams of spring in the depths of winter. In its search for heat, it meats a butcher - and finds heat in the least likely of places. I read this in a particularly melancholy mood while listening to joik music (recommended me by a friend), and snow has covered... Continue Reading →
The Short Story Reader #114 – Papas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Slug Monsters by Erica L. Satifka
Previous | Next Titan is as hostile as a planet gets. Yet humans have colonised it through an ingenious method: liquifying their brains and inserting them within nigh-on indestructible bodies; it's a great method to earn little, live in a cramped dome-home, and mine for mother Earth (or whatever colonial corporation trades with the citizen... Continue Reading →
The Short Story Reader #113 – Wet, Dry, Bitter by Leah Ning
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 →
The Short Story Reader #112 – All the Good You Did Not Do by Jolie Toomajan
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 →