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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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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