Fiction/Nonfiction: fiction

  • Review: The Hands are Coming Too

    A review of a fictional film that sounds a bit like Evil Dead. It’s clever and funny: ‘The Hands are Coming Too.’ (2023) is the unneeded sequel to 80’s box office flop turned reluctant cult classic ‘The Feetening.’

  • Good Night, Sleep Tight

    About the lasting effects of a traumatic and puzzling childhood episode. I hadn’t read anything by Evenson before, but the atmosphere and use of repetition in that story is incredible. I’ll seek out more for sure.

  • Everything Got Worse

    The earth-moving machines had long sputtered out and all the workers were eating or sleeping so I got bored and decided to run off to explore the woods behind our construction site. Tall pines and old oak trees covered the floor in dry needles and acorns and when the crunching stopped underneath my shoeless feet,…

  • The Husband Stitch

  • You Work in the Worst Diner in Existence That’s Always Open for Business

    This is a postapocalyptic horror comedy if that’s allowed to be a thing. It’s wild, gruesome and hilarious. I don’t want to spoil it, but it contains the sentence, “A man asks for an eyeball in his large glass of gasoline served with a bendy straw.”

  • A Yizkor for Charlottesville

    It’s about being Jewish in the midst of *that event* in Charlottesville, and the first sentence is “So, here I am walking around with a skull in my purse.” How can you not click that link?

  • Shedim

    This starts on the first day of a women’s retreat. The whole story feels a little precarious, as though it could go off in one of a few directions: failed relationship, family nightmares, or something much more sinister: That night in my dream, I sit on the back deck of the Fairfield house, tall and…

  • The Children

     Like Stephen King’s take on The Chrysalids, in ~750 words. It’s short and shocking. Read it now, it’ll only take a couple minutes.

  • Mordent

    It’s shocking and unpredictable, about a successful musician whose life starts to spiral in frighting ways. Be warned, there’s suicide in here: The week that everything went wrong started with a fight. This is what you expect me to say, what I wish I could say because saying it would give what followed a neat logic, the…

  • It Never Mattered What Happened at Home

    Whether Dad was drunk, or Mum out cold on the couch. Whether there was food or just the dog and his mange, tongue lolling at his empty bowl which I’d fill with water, saying, sorry, but also, I’m not getting much more today buddy, so quit whining.