Fiction Nuggets Oct 2014 edition

November 1 2014 JY Yang

AND HERE IT IS

On time I kick off the inaugural edition of Fiction Nuggets a monthly roundup of the 5 10 stories I liked best in a month WHOOO IVE DONE IT GO ME SELF PAT ON BACK Shush this is an achievement okay

When I made the decision that this was to be A Thing my initial thought was Oh no Im such a picky reader Ill never find ten stories Ill like enough In the end I had to regrettably trim down the list I originally had because I was several stories over SO MUCH GOOD FICTION SO LITTLE TIME

The overall theme of this months selection might be People suck and family hurts Or it might be Men are awful avoid at all costs No sorry thats just the soundtrack to my life

Some general guiding principles Im only looking at original short stories that first appeared in October I dont have the fine grasp of poetry to review that so I wont EVERYTHING SOUNDS GOOD TO ME I CANT DECIDE So short fiction it is

Here we go

Seeking boarder for rm w attached bathroom must be willing to live with ghosts 500 Berkeley by Rahul Kanakia Clarkesworld This months Clarkesworld was incredibly strong I had to resist listing every story in the issue here They were just that good This tale one of my particular favourites starts off goofy a spooky sendup of Craigslist ads but by the end has twisted its barbed wire fingers around your heart and pulled tight I also have a soft spot for stories that play with format although I was bothered when the epistolary telling subtly shifted into narrative style in the third or so segment Still it was worth sticking through to the end

Lovecraft by Helena Bell Clarkesworld In the opening paragraph of the story a tiny cthulhu crawls out of a mouth that opens up in the side of an old womans neck You expect the rest of the story to drip with eldritch horror and slowly creeping madness What you find instead is a tale of sparse aching domesticity where human vulnerability is the scariest monster of all Strange and beautiful

Hunting Monsters by S L Huang The Booksmugglers A girl is raised by two women in a world where it is expressly forbidden to hunt men who have been turned into beasts Her world is shattered when her mother is arrested for murder her murky past catching up with her Deft prose keeps this story swift moving while still rich with emotion and drama The ending left me with an ache in my stomach I like that sort of thing because Im a masochist

At First Glance by Shannon Peavey Daily Science Fiction Sam is on the road on the run with her sister Brynn who bears a deadly gift under the dark glass of her shades A smoke and grit vision of Americana like that neverending CW show Supernatural but with actual good writing Hark

Brynn hasnt seen her sister in years not since the start of this whole thing But she can put together something of a picture from all the bits and pieces the occasional glances Sam has big feet and her boots are worn Underrun at the heels She has long thin fingers and she bites her nails But her face thats three years out of date

DSFs flash offerings are a hit and miss with me but I almost always enjoy their long Friday piece Im sorry thats going away now that theyre only looking to buy flash fiction

Drowning In Sky by Julia August Women Destroy Fantasy As a rule Ill strive to stick to short stories that are available online to read for free But I enjoyed this piece in the special Women Destroy Fantasy issue of the Fantasy magazine so much I had to give it mention here Set in ancient Greece and thick with myth Drowning In Sky traces the tale of Ann a witch who flees her dead city to Khelike across the sea where she finds gold and honey and betrayal The prose is gorgeous sensuous I wanted to drink it Well worth the read You can purchase the special Women Destroy Fantasy issue here

Santos de Sampaguitas Part 1 Part 2 by Alyssa Wong Strange Horizons I kept seeing rave reviews about this story online before I got a chance to read it When I did the first paragraph grabbed me by the throat and showed me why A searing tale of family and the supernatural set in Manila of dead gods and bloodlines and tragedy told in prose that fills your mouth and burns as it goes down Feast on words like these

The pressure on my chest the terrible prescience that something very bad is about to happen and the sound of distant screaming like a boiling saucepan of human voices are too familiar to me

By the way throughout the entire thing I imagined the storys dead god to be a giant skeleton which is not unsettling after all considering I only have a cRIPPLING FEAR OF BONES AND SKELETAL REMAINS

Jupiter Wrestlemania by Marie Vibbert Lightspeed Karens partner Two Ton Tony is found dead on a Jupiter mining station His death is ruled accidental but is it really A well told SF romp I was surprised by how much I enjoyed reading this story Its a simply told whodunnit offering little in way of plot twist with heavy doses of subjects I dont particularly care about working out and wrestling Yet the meticulous detail in the worldbuilding and the suppleness of the prose kept me captivated At the end of it I thought What a great little story set in a well thought out world

Because I Prayed This Word by Alex Dally MacFarlane Strange Horizons One of the reward levels for SHs annual fund drive and what a delicious treat it was Gorgeous treacly prose about a magical city crafted by desire Poetry and myth and history woven into beautiful narrative Also come on as if I would leave a story about a literal city of lesbians out of this list

The Husband Stitch by Carmen Maria Machado Granta Literary magazines are somewhat outside my usual reading oeuvre so many venues so little time I saw this linked on social media and decided to give it a try I started reading And then kept reading And kept reading The beauty of this story is the way it takes urban myth freshly scraped off the walls of the Internet and kneads it into something electric Anyone familiar with the reams of creepypasta crouched in the dark bowels of the online world will be familiar with many of the figures that appear in the story from the wife with a ribbon around her neck to the hook handed man Its a story about the place of women in the world but its also a story about stories and how they get to be told Its Halloween Perfect time to google creepypasta if youve never heard of it

Toadwords by Nathaniel Lee Daily Science Fiction And this one just out today squeaks past the line and squeezes into the carriage before the October train leaves the station The fairy tale of the girl who speaks in toads is one thats been retold and refashioned any number of times but I was particularly fond of this one Something in the imaginative variety of amphibians that pour forth from the protagonists mouth just appealed to me Theres also a fairly useless prince which amused me See sometimes I like stories that are funny

AND THERE WE HAVE IT Tell me what you think

By the way Im always open to suggestions of good literary markets to follow Thats a part of the map I dont often go to in fear that I may get tangled in the bramble hedges of typewriter tape and folded over scarves Or trapped in forests of brutally precise typography Or maybe with my luck Ill just be run over by a fixed gear bike

Donate to SHs fund drive to unlock more goodness Go on then do it

HOW DO I APPLY TO BE A RESIDENT OF THIS PLACE SERIOUSLY SOMEONE TELL ME