SHORT STORY REX November 2024
1. “The Kwak Race”, Manuela Draegher
Remember October? Remember “worldbuilding discourse”? Well, here’s a story which uses a persistent trickle of casual asides to build a world in which anthills with human faces know how to manufacture themselves, one where mushrooms can get away with anything, where everybody is absent-minded and has strange ideas. A world that somehow no longer has an equator. Our protagonist is a police office, expert in “bizarre cases” except in this world the police don’t exist any more. Nevertheless, a mystery remains to be solved. My first Manuela Draegher, which is to say, my first Antoine Volodine, pretty nifty discovery
2. “We Were All in Agreement”, Joe Koch
Instantly attracted by the byline of this one obviously but the title and first paragraph seal the deal. Calls to mind such antecedents as Brian Evenson’s “No Matter Which Way We Turned” or even Donald Barthelme’s “Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend, Colby”. But this is much grodier and much sexier(?) because come on, it’s Joe Koch we’re talking about here
3. “Our Best Selves”, Hiron Ennes
"Family moves into an old house, and the old house is Fucked Up" is a classic set-up but pretty soon into this one you realize it's not just the house that's fucked up.
The family moving into the house? Also fucked up. And the garden? Buddy, you better believe it's fucked up--making this story especially ripe for enjoyment for Thanksgiving or the eldritch harvest ceremony of your choice
When the harvest is done and we’ve gathered all we can, Mum lies out in the empty garden, wetting the soil and steeping it for the following year. She can’t stop grinning as she feeds the garden, lying in each patch and bleeding for a few hours before moving onto the next. Wordless, hair rustling in the breeze, her voice carries like birdsong through the house.
We’ve done it, she says. We’ve finally done it.
4. “Introduction to the Collection by Anonymous”, Charlie Hughes
The front matter of the latest CHM describes this story as “uncanny metafiction” and as a horror story written in the form of an introduction to a collection of horror stories, it certainly fits the bill. Not to be all “dude thats so meta” but you have to admire the chutzpah of the narrator of this metafictional horror text taking direct and gratuitous digs at the genre of metafictional horror to which the selfsame text belongs. At first the tone is ironic, witty, but six paragraphs in a different descriptor suggested itself to me as I was reading: dastardly. Hughes is up to something truly dastardly here, an oblique interrogation of the reasons we read this stuff and the things it does to us
More short-story rex:
BTW, if you haven’t read the Evenson and Barthelme stories mentioned above, you definitely should. I think you can find both “No Matter Which Way We Turned” and “Some of Us Were Threatening Our Friend, Colby” online pretty easily, with some interesting audio versions even available on Youtube.
I’ve been enjoying The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington, which weirdly reminds me of something Joy Williams wrote about how one of the “8 essential attributes” of a short story is “An animal within to give its blessing”, and if you’ve read Williams you know that she most likely did not mean something metaphorical like a “spirit animal”, she in all likelihood meant the story should have a literal animal in it, probably a dog, and that dog is probably a German Shepherd whereas with Carrington the animal could be a dead rabbit, or a sexy wild boar, or a hundred feral black cats, but let’s face it, it’s probably a horse
Not-a-story rec: “Reality Check”, Schneider TM
beware of the matrix
and keep a warm heart inside
dont jump off the train
theres still a long way to ride