"Enselfening" out now in The Dark
In case you haven’t seen me posting and reposting about it elsewhere, I just thought I’d inform everyone that my story “Enselfening” is up and free to read in this month’s issue of The Dark!
I posted on Bluesky, for example, saying I was “finding it impossible to come up with a pithy sales pitch” for this story and, folks, I still kind of feel that way. When “The Last Spiderbox” came out in Cosmic Horror Monthly in April, I wrote the following:
if I were to explain what it’s about in the by-now-obligatory format of [three-item list, 2 concrete, 1 abstract or vice versa] then I’d probably say something like: “‘The Last Spiderbox’ is a story about onanism, about the role of art in society, and about bio-engineered spiders”.
For whatever reason, I can’t seem to fit “Enselfening” inside that kind of capsule (mainly because obeying the rule of three in this case would likely lead me into spoiler territory). But someone did ask me what “Enselfening” was about a while back and I said something like “A woman goes back to her hometown and revisits her ex and the mysterious reality-breaking quasi-cult he still belongs to”, and that’s accurate, though I should probably add that foetus clouds and eyeball trees (among other things) also feature with some prominence.
All the while, a couple hundred yards away, the Institute produced a subliminal noise, one her drowsy mind did not recognize. A muffled, mechanized percussion like an assembly line, like gearwork chomping up a honeycomb, like a lullaby.
Man, I’m not really selling this very well, am I? Nevertheless, please believe me when I say I’m thrilled this weird thing is out in the world, and that I’m happy with how it turned out and I hope you will read and enjoy it!
Also, if you’ve never read The Dark before, you absolutely should. Start with my story, or with ones I’ve recommended on the newsletter before like:
Jack Klausner. “The Abandoned”
‘Understated and urgent […] the cruelty and the poignancy really snuck up on me”
Thomas Ha. “The Cephalophore”
A “parable that refuses to settle for the polemical, the neatly allegorical […] trademark Ha.”
Nelson Stanley. “Out of All of Them”
“the relationships of these people to these landscapes—the waste ground, the scrap cars, the wire fences—all come across with stark clarity in the tales they tell themselves, the spells they cast on others”
Support good stuff :)
