My Sci-Fi, Fantasy & Horror Short Fiction Roundup - #4 2024

The art for this roundup includes a detail of Marlenia Mori's cover for The Deadlands #34. Find out more about the artist at https://www.instagram.com/marlenia.mori/ 

This roundup features several stories from 2023. They are stories I missed out on reading, for various reasons, when they first came out, but I figure it's never too late to share the love of short fiction.

〰

doorbell dot mov, by Jennifer R. Donohue in The Deadlands

It’s 3:00 a.m. and the doorbell rings, because that’s always when the doorbell rings, if it’s going to. I don’t have to go to the door; I can pull up the video on my phone, always overexposed, too white and also too dark, Blair Witch found footage, despite how good the camera is supposed to be.

A profoundly unsettling and thoroughly haunting short story that involves a doorbell camera and a tragedy. I love Donohue’s intense and sharp prose, and I love the way this story twists and turns as it is told. And the ending? Hits like a sledgehammer.

〰

Alabama Circus Punk by Thomas Ha in ergot

I should have known something was strange because the repairman came after dark. He wore a mask out of respect, but beneath the coated plasticine I could sense the softness of his form. To think, a biological in my home. I would have to be sure to book a scrubbing service to remove the detritus after he was gone.

This is likely one of the strangest and mentally stickiest stories I’ve read in a while. It's the kind of story that gets under your skin and is hard to stop thinking about. It’s science fiction. It’s about robots and biologicals and the tension between them. It’s about life and language and communication and it's about communication (and language) breaking down. Beyond that, well, all I can say is: read it.

〰

Thousand Petal Song by Caroline Hung in Strange Horizons

The Lightning Road cuts far across the Cosmos, a streak of dazzling gold amidst the star-studded void. Paved in otherworldly stone, the road climbs over sleeping giants, past ringed planets and frozen worlds, connecting one unknown to the next. Xiaofei used to like watching it from the hills outside home, the grass soft beneath her bare feet as fireflies sang in the night. This time, she walks along the celestial route herself. Her sneakers crunch over the gravelly path.

A gorgeous tale of magic and faith, and of a goddess who comes down among her worshippers. Hung’s story plays out like a mix of fairytale, legend, and myth. There’s a beautiful flow and warmth to this tale which is part of Strange Horizons’ neurodivergent special issue. You can read the entire issue here: http://strangehorizons.com/issue/29-april-2024/

〰

Lessons in Virtual Reality for Wayward Women by Veronica G. Henry in Many Worlds

Tasha studies a boundless blotch in the Atlantic Ocean where she thinks Manhattan used to sit. The pier — if one could call the skeletal remains of a walkway on which she stands — is all that separates what is left of New Brooklyn from the encroaching coal-dark sludge. She ignores the protest from her knees and crouches down to spy the place where she’d marked the waterline last year on her fiftieth birthday. The crimson stroke is no longer visible, sacrificed to the swelling ocean. She resists estimating the number of years before this pier vanishes completely.

A near-future science fiction story set in a world ravaged by climate change and where everything - the world and the people in it - feels precarious and fragile. Tasha works for BVI, The Bureau for Virtual Investigations where "the staff goes about the business of monitoring the virtual world’s criminals for those most likely to create real-world crimes", and she ends up in the deep end of a plot that plays out like a darkly twisting noir.

〰

Calypso’s Guest by Andrew Sean Greer at Amazon Original Stories

His ship had crashed on the South side of the continent, in a sandy portion my workers had never bothered to cultivate. His wreckage was easy to find; it had boiled the sand to glass, and lay in dunes like an ant in amber, and I remember my heart beating quickly when I saw it. The charred jewel beneath the molten silica, its ruined facets revealed as my workers carefully cleared away debris. 

Greek mythology, Homer’s Odyssey, and science fiction come together into a profoundly moving tale: "A man in exile, banished to a planet far from home and cursed with immortality, discovers that a ship has crash-landed near his settlement. After two hundred years, his heart’s desire has come true. A visitor has finally arrived on his lonely little speck in the stars. He’ll have companionship again. Someone he could love forever. As the weary traveler heals, the two men form a tender bond. But all they’ve come to share may not be enough to curb the visitor’s irrepressible wanderlust. Now the exile, who thought nothing in his endless life would ever change, must make a decision that will change everything."

〰

Those Hitchhiking Kids by Darcie Little Badger in Sunday Morning Transport

They hadn’t died while hitchhiking, and ghosts couldn’t own a car, but Corey and Jimena shared the condition of wanderlust, so something had to be done. In high school, they’d ditch class to bus-hop through Houston, losing themselves in mazes of hot streets. Death hadn’t extinguished the urge to travel without aim, although it made the process trickier, more frustrating.

If you haven’t read Darcie Little Badger’s amazing short story (now nominated for a Locus Award), you should remedy this asap. It’s a ghost story with heart, soul, and spirit. Quoting the writer’s Bluesky post: “I wrote Those Hitchhiking Kids after attending a blessing ceremony for our traditional burial ground in Presidio. And my mind was on ghosts and the passage of time and change and stagnation and the cruel beauty of the desert.”

〰

The Louder I Call, the Faster It Runs by E. Catherine Tobler in Bourbon Penn

In the predawn dark, Annie found herself in a bed, holding onto another hand beneath the cool weight of the pillow. Floral case, it was the trailer—her trailer—and slowly she came back to herself, to her body, and kissed the folded fingers beneath the pillow before claiming the ringing phone, dreadful thing. The voice on the other end was frantic, offering double pay because the cops needed her—needed her boat, a man had gone missing—Ricky had that charter, didn’t she remember—it had to be her, there was no one else. Triple, she said. She lived plain, but there were always bills.

This story is a darkly gleaming masterpiece. It was also picked for Ellen Datlow’s latest Best Horror of the Year, and it’s easy to see why. At the heart of the tale is a lake and a woman who is not really a woman at all. Someone is missing, presumed dead, and the police are searching the lake for a body. Everything about this story is perfectly crafted. What especially struck me is the way Tobler captures places, people, and emotions in such intimate, resonant detail and then looks away at precisely the right moment, allowing the darkness to fill in the emptiness.

〰

Where the God-Knives Tread – Part 1 / Part 2 by A.L. Goldfuss in Lightspeed

The Narrows was an asteroid field stretched over half of the uninhabited Fatagana solar system, composed of billions, if not trillions of ice-glazed rock shards. Even on Jaks’ research scanners it showed as white static, preventing any sort of deeper visuals. But Jaks was brilliant, one of the best Preservationists the program had ever produced, and she had theorized the existence of a planet hidden within the noise. The perfect crash site for a Teshiarr legend.

A lush and complex tale about the discovery and exploration of the ruined remains of an ancient, and very haunted, spaceship. It’s trippy, it's compelling, it's a space-archeology/treasure hunt that turns into something truly dizzying and terrifying the deeper the explorers go into the ship, and into the past.

〰

Even If Such Ways Are Bad by Rich Larson at Reactor

The job comes with an implant, punched into the fleshiest part of Chimezie’s thigh. It’s still aching as he walks down the quay to the waiting wormship. Iron-laced snow falls from the dark sky. Fever sweat freezes on his few exposed slices of skin: forehead, eyelids, the back of his neck. His breath is a ghost.

To quote the story's intro: “A two-person crew embark on a mind-bending deep space mission inside a living wormship capable of burrowing through space. What lies on the other end is unknown—as is what they will do once they get there.” Larson’s story is a surreal and almost hallucinogenic space travel story, and it’s also a story about humanity, about being human, about memory and what we hold on to in order to survive. There’s a great darkness and sadness running through it like a powerful undercurrent.

〰

The Light of Setting Suns by Samuel Chapman in Beneath Ceaseless Skies

Though a veteran tale-teller, Cyfris has kept this one back out of fear. But things have changed. Several times in the past year, he has caught Cydovan sneaking down to the docks to watch the airships take off. She stops each night to watch the sunset, broom or charcoal or food frozen in her hand as she stares at the red-lit horizon. If Cyfris waits another year, he will be too late.

Luckily, he has devised a way to tell it safely. Or so he hopes. No ship is unchanged by the voyage, he has thought many times today, and no story is unchanged by the listener.

This is a gently, beautifully told and profoundly moving example of one of my favourite kinds of stories: stories about storytelling. Cyfris is telling a story to Cydovan, and the story is both a weaving and an unraveling of past and present. I love the quiet sense of love and subtle pain captured here.

〰

To Carry You Inside You by Tia Tashiro in Clarkesworld

In your head, the dead man wakes up crying. He stutters into awareness just as you manage to stanch the tears welling in your eyes, a response to the pressure of his presence on your limbic system. Your fingers brush, irritated, against the port at the back of your neck, catching at the ridges of the drive that carries his consciousness. He’s confused, lashing out to wrest temporary control of your limbs from you in quick staccato bursts before you can yank them back. “Stop that,” you snap, and then, remembering your client, soften the message with a “please.”

In Tashiro’s story, the dead can be brought back to life, sort of, by putting a construct of their consciousness into the body and mind of a living person. The way the technology is used, people can pay to talk to and interact with their dead loved ones, but it’s not easy on either the dead or the living person serving as interface/vessel. I love the way this story makes you feel the intrusive nature of this technology, while you can also understand how seductive it would be. And it also explores what happens when the dead aren’t satisfied with the time they’re given. Dark, sharp science fiction.

〰

Tantie Merle and the Farmhand 4200 by R.S.A. Garcia in Uncanny Magazine

Bright and early ah Tuesday morning I hear the whirring outside and when I peak through my living room curtains is because a big box so on my veranda and Ignatius done traipsing over with he leash trailing to see what he could chew. I reach out and take up the box and close the door and then I sit down in my favourite armchair in front the hologram projector Lincoln buy the year before he die and I read the label.

Garcia’s story about Tantie Merle, her very troublesome and stubborn goat, and the rather advanced Farmhand who tries to help Merle is funny, incisive, and absolutely captivating. It’s a riot to read, and I love the way everyone in the story – goat, woman and Farmhand – undergo some sort of change in the process of their (rather fraught) interactions. Heartwarming doesn’t really cover the vibe of this story, but it’s the kind of story that makes you feel good when you’re reading it.

〰

Kɛrozin Lamp Kurfi by Victor Forna in Apex Magazine

She tells the children to call her Kade Makasi, and if this was one of her stories, she’d describe herself as bent and wrinkled and spider-like for a touch of myth and poetry … but she’s none of these things … she’s tall, thick-browed, with two braided rivers of night on her head, and you’d have never guessed what she was: kurfi, dɛbul, demon, and that she stole my child.

As I’ve already mentioned, I love stories about storytelling, and in Forna’s story, the act of telling a story is a form of magic, and can even be used to trap others, forever, in the realm of a story. However, maybe, just maybe, someone might also turn this magic against the storyteller, finding a way to freedom. It is a twisty, dark, and lustrous story and I love how it depicts the drama and the perils of the duelling storytellers.

〰

In this roundup I also want to highlight some excellent reprints from Escape Artists’ podcasts:

• The Dreadful and Specific Monster of Starosibirsk by Kristina Ten at PseudoPod (narrated by Yaroslav Barsukov) – first published in Weird Horror
• Potemora in the Triad by Sara S. Messenger at Podcastle (narrated by Cherrae L. Stuart) – first published in Fantasy Magazine
• Nobody Ever Goes Home to Zhenzhu by Grace Chan at Escape Pod (narrated by Isabel J. Kim) – first published in Lightspeed Magazine