And we’re back! Time again for another round up of stories I’ve read recently and liked so much I just had to share them with you all and shout them out to the best of my ability. There’s no real theme this week other than my genuinely enjoying all of these stories and wanting to encourage others to give them a try too and I’m afraid I find myself without the mental energy to say much more than that in this intro. I’ve been up since 4am as I right this because I had to get my kid to his school for his grade 8 grad trip by 5. So the brain is not at it’s best! There’s plenty more capable thought below though talking about the actual stories. Please, read on, check them out, see if something grabs your attention.
Continue readingTag Archives: Beneath Ceaseless Skies
2021 Short Fiction Round Up 7
Well, the streak was broken. After six straight weeks of roundups I missed getting one done last week. I’m back now though with the 7th installment of the round up for the year and another five stories I read and enjoyed this past week. We’ve got all sorts of stories here. Selections from a travel guide, a horror story with a monster, a more adventure style storry with a monster hunter, a story of a new romance, and a story of trying to put an end to an unsuccessful one. Hopefully that range should mean everyone can find something here to like for themselves.
“Destinations of Beauty” by Alexander Weinstein from Lightspeed #129
This was an interesting piece that is the latest in a series of travel guide style entries “From the Lost Travelers’ Tour Guide” written by author Alexander Weinstein that have been published in Lightspeed since January of 2020. This was my first time reading part of this series but I’ll definitely be reading through the previous entries. This one focuses on, as the name says, destinations exemplifying beauty in some way, but not necessarily happiness by any means. In fact, there is much in these entries that feel filled with the bittersweet, the melancholy, the nostalgic. Many entries feel written by a very weary traveler finding glimpses of very weary people. Despite all that though, I also find myself feeling a bit of longing reading these. The longing for travel we currently can’t partake in, and the unique memories of finding a special place at the end of a too long and tiring day of exploration that will stay with you for the rest of your life. These stories are written by someone who has traveled and explored and they will resonate a bit more for that with readers who have as well.
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 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 2
The second round up of the year! Will these posts become a monthly thing? I hope not. I mean, that’s a good minimum, but I’d certainly like to do better than that! That’s something to worry about next week though. For now I’ve got some stories I really enjoyed to share with you. Most of them are very recent, one is not. Most are fairly long, one is not. Overall I think just about anyone should be able to find one story to enjoy from this selection, hopefully much more than that. I, of course, enjoyed them all.
Continue readingWeekly Fiction Rec Roundup 11
The Weekly Fiction Rec Roundup returns with it’s 11th installment. I’ve got five stories to share with you this week.There is a lot of despair and darkness in this week’s stories, in particular through our middle three selections that have such a similarity of feel that they could easily fit together in an anthology featuring dark stories of women protagonists who are perhaps uncompromising, perhaps a bit broken, perhaps even unlikeable.
Clearly I was gravitating to the uncomfortable in my reading this weak, though that should not be taken as any condemnation of these stories. We need stories of survival and struggle, both on personal scales and larger and these have it. We also have some interesting sci-fi and a moody, though not dark, not really, jazz-age fantasy to look at. Oh, and this will also be the first Roundup to use in-line notes1Because I tend to be mighty fond of adding parenthetical additions to my main point and I’m kind of liking using this system to both get to ramble on a bit and clean up my presentation., so there’s that.