SHORT STORY REX JUNE 2026

1. “The Show is in the Basement”, Keith Rosson

“What’s up, fellow tapeheads and punks!”

I’m already on the record regarding how “found fiction” is (generally, not always) a hard sell for me. Reason being, there’s a level of perfectionism I want to see when it comes to writers nailing the “target language” and not contorting the chosen format into a “story shape” which it is not at all suited for. (Is this is a unfairly high subjective hurdle to clear? Yeah, maybe!)

None of this is a problem in this story in Three-lobed Burning Eye, rendered in pitch-perfect blog-era, grown-up punk GenXer voice. It’s quite an achievement when a story starts off in such a chirpy and cringey place—“And thusly here we are, my own little blogspottable nook of the digital landscape”—only to wind up somewhere so dark and viscerally upsetting. Speaking of place, it’s all set in Portland with references to the sorts of shows and venues I too once frequented as a younger man¹, written by someone who (like me at one point) almost assuredly had a subscription to MRR their junior year of high school. So if that sounds like you as well, be forewarned, Rosson has your number

2. ”The Glorious”, TJ Price

Here we move from found fiction to meta-horror, a subgenre which for many readers I understand is not a favorite. Some might argue, as blogger Moreau Vazh does in a post about Ligotti's “On the Writing of Horror Fiction”, that

the primary set of feels you get from engaging with this kind of work is a sense of satisfaction and wry amusement at having decoded the message and spotted the reference […] I will happily snort in recognition and tap the table in appreciation of a well-executed shot but that isn’t why I read horror.

The metafictional constraint of the Ligotti story, Vazh writes, serves only to “bracket and muffle” Ligotti's voice. I can sympathize with this idea but ultimately i think horror is a pretty capacious system of affect; there’s no one way to be (and yes, these are scare-quotes) "scared" by fiction. When meta horror works it's rarely a trapdoor into a torture dungeon. It’s a more subtle slippage, a very specific variant of that creeping awareness that the ground (the text) has changed under your feet and you’ve ended up somewhere you never meant to go.

And so, in this spirit of brackets and voice, we come to TJ Price's “The Glorious”. A timely tale about the use of LLMs in literary creation. A horror story about a horror writer writing a story, fighting a losing battle against the temptation to let AI help him create the “creature feature” story in his head. The AI, meanwhile, has other ideas—except it very pointedly does not, indeed cannot, have ideas. And in Price’s poetical treatment of that anti-intellectual nothingspace lies the horror, and in the shame and insidious helplessness that defines the relation of human and so-called AI, the dyad of user and usee (however you care to define those roles in this case), the individual voice being drowned out in this ongoing societal nightmare.

Bonus rex: if you want some more TJ Price (and more brackets) in your life, do check out “[_]he [__]a[__]r[_] of th[_] [_]e[_] [___]r [__] [__]o[___] [_____]t[_]” from last year’s anthology We Will Speak Again of The Red Tower (which I wrote about back in November). His non-fiction is also stellar—I invite you to read it and then look at his Bluesky profile pic and then imagine it as like a stipple portrait atop a column in some prestigious newspaper (if those exist anymore) and how cool that would be

3. “Midnight Flight”, Joel Lane

I actually have TJ Price to thank for recommending this one (my first Joel Lane, I’m somewhat ashamed to say!). We go from a story about a writer trying to write a horror story to a story about a reader searching for a horror anthology (a story which itself appeared in an anthology entitled The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies).

Our protagonist starts off already in a bad way: “Paul Cooksey remembered the book’s title on the same day that he forgot where he lived”. His quest to find the titular anthology which he’d read in his childhood is not an exercise in nostalgia but a struggle against dementia and oblivion.

The anthology in question deals with flying creatures (“there were other kinds of winged creatures in the book […] but it was the moth ones he remembered most clearly”), and the way this story patiently bides its time before unfurling its wings and swooping in for the kill is truly remarkable imo, and leaves you wondering what is a more cruel and bizarre fate, to forget everything or to ever remember anything at all

4. “En el hemisferio sur”, Cristina Fernández Cubas

Late last year the annual Festival 42 was held near my house, with the guest of honor being author Cristina Fernández Cubas, whom I had never read. I was unable to attend but it ended up inspiring me to do a bit of deep dive on CFC, checking out her omnibus collection Todos los cuentos from the library, reading a bit of criticism (such as Jessica A. Folkart’s book Angles on Otherness in Post-Franco Spain: The Fiction of Cristina Fernández Cubas), etc.

Folkart situates Fernández Cubas alongside contemporaries like Manuel Vázquez Montalban, Eduardo Mendoza, Juan José Millas, Ana María Moix and Soledad Puértolas in what was then called the ‘nueva narrativa española’, and in many quarters she's credited with a revitalization of the Spanish short story in a moment when the genre did not enjoy all that much prestige. Which is interesting to me, because (perhaps due to a failure on my part, of not listening in the right places) her name is not one I hear mentioned in relation to the last decade and half’s boom of women writing Spanish-language darkly-inflected short fiction (Schweblin, Enriquez, Colanzi, Ampuero, y una larga etcétera). And while Fernández Cubas might not have served as a direct inspiration in the reading lives of the above writers (for reasons geographical, generational, or otherwise), she can certainly be read as a forerunner to their work and like theirs, her work can be situated in the tradition of “cuento fantástico” which “is born with Edgar Allan Poe, Guy de Maupassant y E.T.A Hoffman [and] is renewed and revitalized in the 20th century in the work of Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar and Silvina Ocampo, among others”.²

Specifically, Fernández Cubas is often called a writer of the Gothic, and if the contemporary shorthand for “the Gothic” is a stereotypical image of a woman in a long dress running to escape from a castle or mansion or some other kind of cursed abode, in the stories of Fernández Cubas, that abode is often a girls’ boarding school, or a convent, and that’s no mistake. With their feminist themes, and in the historical juncture in which they appear (especially her earlier collections, published soon after Spain’s transition to democracy), stories like “Mi hermana Elba” or “Mundo” or “Los altillos de brumal” dramatize just such a Gothic escape, in this case from the decrepit nightmare cathedral that was the fascist Franco dictatorship.

But I was talking about meta-horror, which brings me to “En el hemisferio sur”. Here we have a story about a writer, a woman, though she is seen only through the gaze of her friend, a man (also no mistake). The manner of the telling is a deceptively straightforward 1st person but the true crux of the story is arrived at only obliquely. The narrator is a would-be author, a male Salieri to his friend Clara’s female Mozart. She comes to his office, distraught, complaining about a Voice she hears which relentlessly pours inspiration into her ear, forcing her to pound out copy night after sleepless night at her typewriter. Our narrator listens impatiently until she gets to the part where she enters a bookstore and finds the same story she’d been typing up, the life she’d been living, already published and on sale.

“It can’t be,” I said, stifling a cry. The shop assistant handed me a copy of IT CAN’T BE, by Sonia Kraskowa. I had to lean on a bookcase to keep from falling over. “I think I’m losing my mind,” I mused in a barely audible register. “Not quite,” the man interrupted, adjusting his glasses and pointing out THE DAY I THOUGHT I LOST MY MIND.

Her position, psychologically, is an untenable one: she is being dictated to and at the same time is being narrated. Things come to a dramatic head but Clara’s story continues even in the aftermath, to the point that we become more than a little unsure who even Clara is or what we are reading or who is really doing the writing. A subtle, multidimensional reversal takes place, of causality and rules and even, as the title implies, of geography. I’m not ashamed to say I had to read this story no less than three times in a row. This one along with “Los altillos de Brumal” are my favorites so far and I look forward to getting onto her other stuff outside the Todos Los Cuentos collection, of which there seem to be plenty!

NOT-A-STORY REC: “Five Dollars an Hour”, Born Against

Figured id end with something apropro to the first story recommended this month, and after Googling a bunch of records i used to own that are apparently worth a bunch of money now, this is what i landed on: