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Haunted Neighborhoods: Book reviews of Gwendolyn Kiste's The Haunting of Velkwood and Ai Jiang's Linghun

The haunted house is a staple of horror tales. But in their new books Gwendolyn Kiste and Ai Jiang bring us haunted neighborhoods —Ai Jiang’s work actually involves an entire town—that threaten to entrap and swallow their protagonists whole, keeping them locked in with ghosts of the past. Both books are confrontations with loss and trauma; they’re both about making peace with the dead and letting them go (if you can). They take different forms in these explorations and approach these themes from different angles and with differing outcomes. But they are both gorgeously told works, and haunting.   The Haunting of Velkwood by Gwendolyn Kiste Twenty years ago, Velkwood Street—a little block of eight houses, in a “blink-and-miss-it sort of subdivision”—disappeared from the face of the earth. Or rather, it part-way disappeared: it’s still visible, glowing, half-there and half-not, a kind of suburban Brigadoon behind an invisible, supernatural barrier. Scientists, government agencies, and p

Short fiction recs! Dec 2023--Jan 2024

  Late, but here are some stories I read and loved in December 2023 and January 2024.   Published in 2023 (many from earlier in the year)   “What is Owed and What Can Never Be” by Ariel Mark Jack in Beneath Ceaseless Skies “I am owed this death.” All that is around Viktoriya halts as the words exhale into whiteness against the winter-bleached sky. She squeezes the chilly trigger between steady beats of her sturdy heart. The rifle, held tight to her shoulder, kicks like a storm. The five-legged deer crumples into the brush. A young woman ekes out a living for herself in a harsh wilderness, hunting to feed and clothe herself and pay off a contract debt that she was tricked into as a child. But what starts off as a gritty, compelling tale of survival and debt bondage takes on an unexpected turn toward the end, becoming a beautiful, hopeful tale that asks: what is owed to us in life? What do we owe? What is owned, what is ours, and what can never be taken away?   For Howeve

New story day! "The Cold Inside" at Metaphorosis Magazine

I have a new story that’s out and free to read today! “The Cold Inside”   is published at the lovely Metaphorosis Magazine as part of a special issue of returning authors (check out the other writers in the Winter Issue of 2024 !)  “The Cold Inside” is about grief and cold and a ghost in white. It’s set in the woods of northern Michigan, in an unnamed town but based on a region I know and love. The artwork that Candra Hope c reated for my story is perfect , and I’m so pleased to be part of this magazine. 

5 Short Story Collections from 2023

Five collections/anthologies of short stories that I read and loved in 2023.    Like Smoke, Like Light: Stories by Yukimi Ogawa The title of this collection is apt, for Ogawa’s stories are indeed like light or smoke: delicate, shifting things of beauty; slippery, hard to pin down or grasp, hard to capture into boxes or labels. These are strange, hybrid stories that blend fantasy, folklore, horror, and science fiction. There are wonderful monsters galore, as in “Hundred Eye,” a story about a thief with a hundred eyes on her long arms, and “Rib,” a story about a skeleton woman who helps an orphaned little boy. In “The Flying Head at the Edge of Night,” a head does indeed fly about unconscious each night and must be tracked down by its body each morning. There are misfits and outsiders of all types in these stories, including an artificial intelligence (AI) in “Nini,” who discovers a forgotten goddess in a space station. Some of these misfits are merciless, wreaking a deserved and c

Book review: He Who Drowned the World by Shelley Parker-Chan

  He Who Drowned the World by Shelley Parker-Chan is my first great read of the year. I suspect it will be among my top reads of all this year and is in fact one of my favorite reads of all time.   Although “favorite” may seem an odd choice of words here. He Who Drowned the World is dark. Almost unrelentingly dark. It’s the sequel to Parker-Chan’s thrilling She Who Became the Sun , which was also marked by darkness and cruelty as it told the story of Zhu Yuanzhang’s rise to power in a queer, gender-flipped alt-historical and lightly fantastical retelling of the founding of the Ming Dynasty. In the sequel, we follow Zhu and others as they mercilessly plot and fight for the throne. Madam Zhang, the unofficial power behind the powerful Zhang family, is seemingly Zhu’s most formidable threat. In a world where women of her status are expected to be decorative dolls, Madam Zhang takes full advantage of what power she’s allowed, making herself into the most beautiful and entrancing of dol

Short fiction recs! Oct-Nov 2023

Some stories that I read and loved, from October through November.    Fantasy “Four Words Written on My Skin” by Jenn Reese in Uncanny Magazine When the Fae stole my wife, I followed them into the dark woods to win her back.   A short but achingly sharp and lovely piece about finding what’s been lost. The Fae stole the narrator’s wife, but the narrator has been losing Jess for a long time, before the Fae ever appeared. What follows is a confrontation with the narrator’s own responsibility for that loss, for the distance that’s grown between them. And, at the end, a glimmer of hope—the decision to choose to love. Beautifully told.     “Six Versions of my Brother Found Under the Bridge,” by Eugenia Triantafyllou in Uncanny Magazine Technically it was built on top of a river that had been dredged and filled in some fifty years ago which made the ground under the bridge degraded and pretty dangerous. But rumor had it—and by rumor Olga meant Maria’s oldest cousin who had be