SHORT STORY REX July 2025
1. “The Night Market”, Erin Brown
Thoroughly dug this story in issue 4 of The Skull & Laurel. The fantasy setting, its thatched roofs and castle, marks a sharp contrast with the jaggedly modern experimentalism of the prose. Desire contrasts with abhorrence, the utter darkness of the titular market with the merest promise of escape or final relief. A demonic, squelching reading experience
2. “The Interior”, Christi Nogle
I talked about Nogle’s “Auxiliary, Supplementary, Inessential” last year, and like that story the main character here is a university professor. But where that one centred on the psychological horror of precarity in the teaching sector itself, here that perspective serves to directly problematize fear as its own object of academic inquiry.
In a poorer, smaller classroom years before, she was saying, “The spaces around us have their way with us. Architecture and décor predetermine the experiences we have in a room. Consider a room in which its impossible to feel boredom — or one that cultivates boredom and ennui. What would either look like?”
A student asked “What about a room that could drive someone mad?” and the professor smiled thoughtfully.
Of course the economic anxiety from the earlier story is not entirely absent, as our Professor Murphy not only teaches interior design and “environments” and the like but also seeks to supplement her income using her skills for sometimes dubious special commissions (““Whatever is the opposite of feng shui. Whatever is the opposite of ‘good vibes’,” the stepfather had said, and while his understanding was poor, the professor knew what he wanted and knew that she could do it, easily.”)
Early on in the story she is approached for just such a commission, a lucrative one. Interspersed throughout her work on the project, we get fragments of student responses to one of the professor’s essay questions:
“But what are the physical horrors particular to our era? What games and rides and experiences might we devise if we wanted to simulate the stressors and anxieties of our present day?”
Things, as you might already be imagining, do not go well. The unraveling is so sudden and yet so subtle I’m a bit awestruck as to how Nogle brings it off. Absolutely “the opposite of good vibes”
3. “An Offering of Algae”, Uchechukwu Nwaka
The table of contents for Undertow Publications’ Best Weird Fiction of the Year was revealed earlier this month, and there were 4 stories there which I recommended back in 2024 (though in some cases only briefly or in passing). But there was a lot I missed. Much of that appeared in anthologies I’d not read or even heard of, but others have been available online for all to read, and so I decided I should get on that. Among those I want to highlight is this one from Fusion Fragment #21.
In a similar way to the Erin Brown story above, there is an interesting contrast in how “A Offering of Algae” trains a modern lens on what feels like a classically Weird scenario. The way Nwaka dramatizes the protagonist Nzeh’s interactions with his father and his friend and fellow initiate Munachi, along with the present-tense narration, felt very contemporary in its sensibilities, offering an unexpectedly down-to-earth perspective on this post-apocalyptic hellscape where survivors cower underground, surviving on the ritual consumption of literal godflesh. There’s an unexpected sumptuousness in spots—like, to my recollection, the word ichor does not appear in the story but it doesn’t need to. For some reason this story radiates ichor at me and i wanna be perfectly clear that that is A Good Thing imo
MAGAZINE REC: Interzone #302
Interzone continues to do great work, presenting a consistently wide and thoughtfully curated swath of ‘fantastika’ in all its forms. #302 is no exception, including these three bangers among others:
“No Shelter Beneath the Searchlights”, Steve Toase: The story of young Ingrid, a little girl living in the DDR, near the border between East and West Germany. “Everything on the border was overlooked, but there were always slivers of concealment from the panopticon.” Ingrid, too, is a watcher, an observer in her own way, her curiosity drawn to the view from her window, always wondering whether the men in the watchtower can see her seeing them. It’s there she witnesses—and more crucially, hears—a creature, a consciousness, wounded, trapped in that no-man’s-land between one side and the other. The prose gets deeper and darker as the story burrows back into time, layers and layers hidden below the surface.
“Vanitas”, R.L. Summerling: Had to run to my online dictionary of choice when I read the first line of this one—“I had asked the old man not to deadhead my roses”—and for the life of me I couldn’t help but picture this image:
(let the record show ive never been a fan, btw) Anyways thats how I learned that “deadhead” is also a verb! The garden vandalism escalates from Miss Tabitha to Sangria Sunset to Arcadia. But there’s something else going on here. “Time should unfurl in delicate, perfumed spirals, no death, just beauty without end.” Beautiful stuff, as we have come to expect from Summerling
“The Toy”, Seán Padraic Birnie: Our protagonist falls asleep on the train, and dreams that she is riding on a train. She awakens suddenly, frightened to find she’s very nearly missed her stop, but she soon realizes it’s the wrong stop. Or maybe it was the wrong train, or as it now occurs to me, maybe it’s the wrong person? The masterfully rendered interior monologue sinks us deep into her déjà vu, or jamais vu, or presque vu or what have you, experiences already lived, or almost lived, thoughts already thought or almost thought. “A logical possibility, immaterial, briefly real.”
All that plus more fiction from Rachael Cupp, Bogdan Domakha, Alexandra Grunberg, E F McAdam, Carlos Norcia, Yukimi Ogawa, Kate Orman, Tamsin Showbrook, and non-fiction in the form of columns and book reviews by columns by Aliya Whiteley, Paul Kincaid, Nick Mamatas, Marian Womack and many more. Support Interzone, everyone!!!
Not-a-story rec: Black Sabbath
I had never been to what you’d call a proper “concert”. Punk shows, yes, but never a giant open-air arena situation. So my first real concert experience was Black Sabbath. 1999, this would have been. I went with my then-bandmates to the Walnut Creek Amphitheatre or whatever tacky paid-advertising appelation it had affixed at the time. Opener Godsmack sucks ass. Finally Sabbath's getting into it, its a sweltering North Carolina August, and Ozzy sprays the crowd with a forehose, just really letting them have it. They do “Nativity in Black” and as they launch into the chorus, a totally random and extremely drunk stranger throws an arm around my shoulder, pulls me close, and bellows: “YOUR LOVE FOR ME HAS JUST GOT TO BE REAL / BEFORE YOU KNOW THE WAY I’M GOING TO FEEL / I’m GOING TO FEEL…” He sings the whole chorus all the way through, only letting me go when the riff kicks back in. I get it, dude is excited; the song fuckin rules. He had dark hair and a mustache and stubble, an older fellow as I recall. Wonder whatever happened to that guy, how he took the recent news of Ozzy’s death. Hope he’s all right.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFzDKTNLr2kI absolutely recommend you all read John Darnielle’s obituary for Ozzy in Pitchfork, which really nails so much about the figure of Ozzy Osbourne and what he represents. It might seem easy to do what he did, but then he made it sound easy. You try hitting that high note in the chorus of “Hole in the Sky”, i dare you
https://youtu.be/fg5p78QlqTM?feature=shared https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zC-QYFK7RoSo I found that life is just a game
But you know there's never been a winner
Try your hardest, just to be a loser
The world will still be turning when you're gone
Yeah, when you're gone