2022 Short Fiction Round Up 5

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 1

Welcome to the first Round Up of short fiction recommendations for 2021. And it’s happening in the first week of 2021 even! Happy New Year. Welcome. I hope it’s a great year for everyone.

Now, a bit of a strange thing happened when I put this round up together. In attempt to be proactive and organized I started diving into some of the magazines I subscribe to that had new issues available for stories to read this week. Start the new year off ahead of the game for once, right? Well I ended up very ahead of the game as none of the stories I read and recommend below are currently available for free. Most magazines release their full issue to subscribers first and then release the content online slowly over the course of the month. That is one of the perks of subscribing. So, four of these five stories will be available for free eventually. But if you want to read them right now you’ll have to buy the relevant issue or subscribe (assuming you don’t already).

I felt a little worried about that when I realized what I’d done, but, on the other hand magazines need support to survive and I don’t feel it’s wrong to point that out sometimes. So, for now each link takes you to the website for each magazine where you can purchase a copy of the issue. As the stories are released online I will update my links to take readers directly to each story.

“Delete Your First Memory For Free” by Kel Coleman from FIYAH Magazine #17

There many different ways a story can surprise you. Some are great, like cleverly subverting and playing with tropes. Some are not great at all, like the “shocking twist” ending that is only a surprise because it was completely unearned.1These can work, especially in flash fiction, but often just feel lazy at best. This story surprised me by simply not going where I thought it would. In a story about a character dealing with anxiety and the technology for deleting memories (such as an embarrassingly bad joke told the first time you met your crush) I expected something in the sci-fi horror realm to develop. In some, perhaps many, writers’ hands I think it would have. Instead we get something sweeter. Something kinder. With more understanding of just how awful and very real it can be to kick yourself months or even years later for that awkward thing you said when you were trying to be anything but. It is also a wonderfully real take on just how things probably would play out if a nascent memory deletion technology were to become available.

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2019 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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Weekly 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.

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Weekly Fiction Rec Roundup 6

Ok! The last four weeks of holidays and holiday recovery have devastated my regular routines and habits, and nascent ones such as my daily story recommendations on Mastodon and Weekly Roundups here took the biggest hits. Time to get back on track though. I did make 4 recommendations since 2018 started and I’m throwing in one old favorite here to bring it up to 5 stories I’ve enjoyed and want to share with you.

As always, you can find a list of all previous roundups, and the featured authors of said roundups, here.

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Weekly Fiction Rec Roundup 3

Week 3! My goal to read at least one short story a day and to share either it or another favorite story of mine on my Mastodon feed continues to go well. I’m loving the energy I’m getting from all the great reading and from having this goal I’m sticking to. I’m also happy the roundups have started getting some momentum going on the blog here and as this gets really established I plan to start adding more regular posts (probably starting with a return to Reading Old Comics).

OK, I’ve got a full flight of 7 stories to share with you (the first time in this young project that’s happened. Week 1 wasn’t actually a full week and in week 2 I missed a day) so we need to get into them, but an important note first. I will try to focus on recent fiction, but sometimes I dip back into stories form previous years, and sometimes I share a reprint. So if you’re looking for stories to read for any sort of awards purposes just be aware not all stories I share are going to qualify for such things.

Now, the stories!

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