SHORT STORY REX March 2025
for reasons that will become apparent i should go ahead and point out that all opinions expressed herein are exclusively my own haha
1. “sharp house”, Samir Sirk Morató
SSM is fast becoming an SSR all-star. This is the third time in as many months that one of their stories has “dipped its mitts in my slush"—no, I will not explain what I mean by that phrase, you will just have to read this sad little over-the-top take on the haunted-house story and experience Morató's special strain of gore poetics yourself
2. “We Will Not Dream of Corals”, Mario Coelho
If you're like me, you've gotta love a story that starts with a dead billionaire. If you're like me, you think this world needs more stories about dead billionaires. Lightly fictionalized telefilms. Hit docuseries. News stories.
“Josiah Burke is dead,” our protagonist posts on social media when she finds his corpse washed up on the beach. “This is a good thing.”
Readers of this newsletter might know Coelho from his criminally overlooked post-cyberpunk novella Unto the Godless, What Little Remains or his short story “Ootheca”, fondly remembered as “the one about the guy with cockroaches for teeth”(and if you haven't read it I recommend you rectify that situation). Coelho's writing in those works often display a sentence-level deftness and daringness that tends towards the abstract, the nearly opaque.
“We Will Not Dream of Corals”, to some extent, throws all that overboard. Things are set out relatively simply, the better to appreciate its high quotient of sorrow and rage. As I say, I wouldn't mind seeing more stories where the billionaires die in SFF short fiction, or on the front page of the newspaper (just as all things that live must eventually die. Of natural causes, of course. In Minecraft, etc.)
3. “X Marks the Pedwalk”, Fritz Leiber
This 1963 story begins with a car full of dudes with hyphenated surnames like “Smythe-de Winter” mowing down a poor grandma in a crosswalk, but not before the grandma squeezes off a slug that kills two passengers. And then it just sort of escalates from there? At first glance, it would appear to be inspired by automotive and traffic-related anxieties of that era (appearing, for example, two years before Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed). One would think such a story really shouldn’t feel quite so timely reading it here in 2025. But then you get to the line about the “Whitewall Fascists of Suburbia”, or the discussion of dropping ‘SQ’ or Sanity Quotients—”The wheels inside my people’s heads are slowing down,” the ‘chief motorist’ laments during peace negotiations, “I do not think they will be speeded up in my lifetime” and you start to feel, as the chief motorist later remarks, like “figments in a paranoid’s dream” which is a very 2025 way to feel, honestly
SHORT STORY PODCAST REX:
I quite enjoy hearing writers I admire reading their own work, something about matching the voice of the writer to the ‘voice’ of the writer I find rewarding as a listener. For example:
“The Building Across the Street”, by R.T. Ester: in an interview segment before his reading on Interzone's podcast IZ Pod, Ester explains, “I’ve been fortunate enough that I’ve had close calls but there’s never been a time in my life when I was living on the street but Leland, the story’s main character, was based loosely on people I’ve known who did go through that, and once I decided to write a story like this, using their experiences as sort of a springboard for the story’s more fantastical premise, I guess I knew I would have to honor that experience” and (with similar caveats with respect to my position as reader) this story feels more than honest and honorable in that sense. It reminds me a bit of Nathan Ballingrud’s “The Way Station” (included in his collection North American Lake Monsters)—the way the ‘fantastical premise’ of each story evokes the displacement, the separation, of the protagonist’s situation, both absolutely worth checking out
“Glass Piano”, Ivy Grimes: I’ve actually recommended this story already almost two years ago when it was published in Hex, and have also talked up Grimes’s amazing collection Glass Stories where it also appears so I won’t say much more about this one, reading starts around the 30:00 mark, followed by an interview, courtesy the DC Public Library’s Get Lit Podcast. Also, pre-order her debut novel, The Ghosts of Blaubart Castle!
