June 30, 2025

SHORT STORY REX June 2025

SSR June 2025: the ‘playing the hits’ edition

1. “Slowsand”, Joe Koch

“Mr. Schrift comes at me backward through the dirt, which I understand doesn’t make sense.” Yes, it’s Joe Koch in ergot., sense-making is not, strictly speaking, the main priority. The narrator ruminates, obsesses, over the multiple appearances of this Mr. Schrift, as well as over their job, and while they (our narrator) seem more concerned with the former, as a reader I personally was left to wonder more about the latter. What is this work that must be done, the work their grandfather also did? It involves “near-liquid sediment”, “silt sucking”, “miasmic fluid”. But it feels like the more info we receive the less we understand, like the universe is taunting us, playing in our faces like haha we gave you all the clues. “He must not trust me not to sleep.” Joe Koch is a writer who trusts his readers. Let’s not disappoint, shall we?

2. “The Cephalophore”, Thomas Ha

Every time I see Thomas Ha has a new story a part of my brain gets so excited it screams “new Ha!”, and for that i apologize:

Ha has things to say about the world, and he says them in a Thomas Ha way, a way that can vary greatly from story to story while remaining distinctively Ha. The settings might change, the tone admits various nuances, the genre trappings may range from the fantastical to the science-fictional to a unique melange of the two. But the approach taken in the exquisitely titled “The Cephalophore”—the parable that refuses to settle for the polemical, the neatly allegorical—that, to me, is trademark Ha.

Fewer and fewer of us had been able to sleep as the seasons changed. The windows of our buildings were infested with the sleepless looking out at the sleepless. Many feared, or simply accepted, that we were slowly going insane.

We’re in a fantasy city that literally never sleeps, where ‘Enemies’ are put to death on derricks just outside of town, where the dead can walk and talk like anyone else except not quite, and children beg coins to “buy their way out of the cages, […] [w]ork off their debt and delay their sentencing as Enemies; that was, at least, the hope.”

…and I’m going to have to restrain myself from quoting ever and ever more extensively from this piece before I end up just reproducing the whole thing. Do us both a favor, save me that effort and read it for yourself. ”I will see you at the walls.”

3. “Three Plagues”, Ivy Grimes

Now are you beginning to see why I’m calling this the “playing the hits” edition? This one in Ninth Letter concerns a chipper and dutiful young woman dealing with a curse on her head, all while seeking an equilibrium between her mother on one hand, who lives on the roof of the house and won’t come down, and her grandmother on the other, an earthquake survivor who has convinced herself that she did not in fact survive, that she is dead. All three women are negotiating the boundaries between watchfulness and over-protectiveness, between self-preservation and paranoia. There’s an almost bittersweet abjection and claustrophobia in the intergenerational relationships that reminds me some of Can Xue here¹, though as longtime readers of this newsletter are no doubt already aware, Grimes's blend of absurdity and poignancy has a distinctive flavor all its own.

Speaking of women and claustrophobic intergenerational dynamics, see the Not-short story rec below…

4. “The Country”, Joy Williams

I bought my copy of The Visiting Privilege many years ago now, but at the time of the writing I still have not read all the stories. It’s one of those short story collections I’m scared to finish, a book I never want to end. There was a point where I stopped (after “Dangerous”, I think, p432 of my edition) and instead would go back and reread my favorites. Just last week, though, I decided I’d delve into that last handful of stories. For whatever reason, I skipped straight to “The Country”.

William’s stuff occupies such an uncanny, (dare I say it) liminal space with respect to hoary old “genre”/”literary” disputes. Even her stories that are most clearly located on the Iowa City, minimalist, “psychological realism” side of things have this sort of ineffable arcane radiance about them. And then there are her works (more frequently, it seems, as her career has progressed) that blatantly flirt with the apocalyptic and the supernatural.

The story that concerns us now (originally in Tin House, reprinted at Electric Literature—feel free to disregard their unfortunate clickbait-y headline) is one of the latter group of stories, and unsurprisingly for a Joy Williams short story, it is about death. Our narrator comes home from a grief counseling group to his son Colson, age nine, who has taken to speaking in the voices of his dead grandparents.

“When he enters these phases I become exhausted. Sometimes, I admit, I flee. He doesn’t seem to need me to fulfull his conversations with the dead, if indeed they are conversations. They seem more like inhabitations.

“The Country” of the title is that mythical place children are told about when a pet dies, “where overly exuberant family pets often found themselves”, that mysterious land we will all one day find ourselves, a place surrounded by lies.

NOT-SHORT STORY REC: Mandíbula, Monica Ojeda

I must say that the "dark academia", "girls in school uniforms being subversive and genre-savvy" genre isnt a priori something I usually go in for--especially when liberally seasoned with pop culture references, ie boys with faces "like a young Johnny Depp" and so on. (As an aside, some of these struck me as so anachronistic it strained credulity. Or maybe not. Maybe posh teens at ultracatholic private schools in 2010's Guayaquil are just super-clued into 1960s pop-culture icon Twiggy like that, maybe the Twiggy "aesthetic" was real big on Ecuadorian Tumblr—actually yes that's almost certainly it but appropriately for this book (as we'll see) I don't suppose I'll never know for sure.

Nevertheless, I ended up kind of devouring this thing (pun intended), and when I finished it on the metro I could help but pronounce the words “fuck yeah, that rocks" out loud (tbc because the writing is so good not because what happens in the final scenes is cool and fun to me, im not a monster, i swear).

And the writing is just that good, with the aforementioned pop-culture references forming merely one thread in the book's tapestry of striking images and wily deployments of techniques and POVs. The interview segments (in which our main character Fernanda goes on at length while her psychiatrist’s interlocutions are left blank) are an interesting and thought-provoking choice, for example, and as far as “excuses to insert a lengthy essay about the nature of horror media into my horror novel” are concerned, having one character be a student (Annelise, the creepypasta clique’s imbalanced mastermind) who writes and submits said essay to another character, her teacher (Clara, a newcomer to their Opus Dei private school, traumatized by former students and living permanently on the edge of a panic attack) is just brilliant in its simplicity, you have to admit.

It really is remarkable the skill with which Ojeda takes a premise and cast of characters that might ordinarily threaten to become grist for the YA mill—teen protagonists, creepypastas, a clique and a betrayal—and weds that onto this politically and psychologically astute meditation on the horror (as well as the capital-H Horror) of womanhood and motherhood and girlhood and daughterhood and of the parts in between, the disturbed psychosexual domain of Annelise’s invented “white God” and surrounding mythos. The bravura finish pulls zero punches and, like the transcripts of Fernanda's therapy sessions, leaves many crucial elements deliberately blank. And not in a "oops! plot hole" way, but rather one that seems to say: "none of these characters are ever going to get closure on these events, what on Earth, dear reader, makes you think that you would ever deserve any?"

Not-a-story rec: "Alley Pang", The Skatalites

There was a discussion elsewhere online about ska music, and can you guess who piped up in the role of the unsufferable, “1st-wave-ska-only-for-me-please, thank-you-very-much” hipster. Here’s a hint: it was me, I piped up in that role. Anyways here is an old favorite of mine:

Like I said, it’s not recorded in the early 1960s and preferably instrumental, then i’m probably not interested