SHORT STORY REX Sep 2026

NON-FICTION REC: ‘beyond the margin frame’, Brandon O’Brien

I meant to include this last month but my brain was very much mush at that moment and I forgot to, and I think it’s important so I’m putting it up front here.

In my post about the spat of AI-related revelations in the SFF short-fiction ecosystem, and the debates around aesthetics and AI detection that ensued, I mentioned in a footnote that “there's a related but separate discussion to be had re concerns over representation of marginalized identities and how AI scammers appear to exploit those concerns, but I'm in a position more suited to sitting and listening to that discussion than making grand pronouncements on it.”

Well, Brandon O’Brien wrote an essay about all of that and much more, and it is the most insightful and thorough-going writing I have seen on the topic, particularly in how it trains its sights on the racist power dynamic at work in all stages in the publishing industry, from debut-author hype cycle to career-ending debacle and insincere wringing of hands.

In my corner of Bluesky at least, the discourse on this has died down a bit, but everything O’Brien says in this essay still bears repeating. If you haven't read this essay I encourage you to stop reading this newsletter and go read it right now instead

1 and 2. “MR_MR_CENTICORE”, Micah Giddens and “Baby Blue”, Sean Padraic Birnie

Catching up with Strange Horizons, i was quite taken with this one, in which adolescence is presented as a haunted miasma of edgy memes and sleep paralysis deer-spirits, tinged with a smell of marzipan, bleeding into some semblance of adulthood, but with a forbidden past you can only access via astral projection. The accretion of details feel painfully lived-in, the tightrope of anomie and pathos is supertaut, and we are treated to some of the most inobtrusive, effectively transparent use of 2nd person present-tense you're likely to see these days.

In Giddens’s story, the protagonist “you”’s desire is this enigmatic amorphous thing which they (“you”) must discover or invent the true shape of. In Sean Padraic Birnie’s stark "Baby Blue", on the other hand, the shape of the enigma is clear from the very first line: the tiny mouth on the side of Darragh's neck.

In Year 11 his classmates will nominate him Student Most Likely to Carry Out a High School Shooting.
It won’t be true. They’re not called High Schools in England, he will think to answer, but he won’t say anything. He will have learned the hard way that he needn’t respond.

Darragh's violent response to bullying, to his sister's illness, his parents divorce, and the entire world, will be sublimated on the football pitch, and in his tiny, smile-shaped wound: "The world has narrowed to this point."

3 and 4. Joel Lane, “Quarantine” and M. John Harrison, “Running Down”

Had the pleasure of reading Joel Lane for the first time earlier this year, which inspired me to pick up his collection Where Furnaces Burn. Around the half-way mark of that book, we get “Quarantine”, which begins with a description of a crime scene that hints at germophobia, and a notion of police procedure as prophylaxis against same: "As long as the yellow tape protected the broken chair, the scattered books and the crust of blood on the walls, the victim was still with us." An anxiety of infection overtakes our detective protagonist as he investigates a series of mysterious deaths in a hostel, until finally he must confront (among other things) "the tapping and creaking of a thousand forms of life."

If in the preceding stories in the collection, the squalor is merely a symptom of, or avatar for, the awful otherworldly weird, in "Quarantine", the squalor itself becomes The Weird, the frightening shapes that entropy in all its guises imposes on our human notions of what is good and right.

Sometimes the slow entropic process of dwindling and decay is inexorable and eternally final, and sometimes it’s merely a prelude to a sudden cataclysmic burst, as in Harrison's "Running Down", first published over 50 years ago now in New Worlds Quarterly and collected in his Settling the World: Selected Stories 1970-2020 (another recent acquisition for me). It's ‘70s England, and fascist fervor is bubbling up in the streets as our narrator Egerton is reunited with an old school ‘friend’ (for lack of a better word). Lyall, an accident-prone man defined by his "raw and gaping self-concern", invites Egerton to his "amazingly dilapidated" home. The mutual distrust and incomprehension that has defined these two men's relationship come to a volcanically violent head, and there's something at once mythic and pathetic in Harrison's treatment of the climactic scene. Something far bigger than a man's life has come crashing to the ground.

5 and 6. “Las voladoras” and “Sangre coagulada”, Mónica Ojeda

Needed a break from all the exquisite British bleakness above, and so I ducked into the library and was psyched to find not one but two books by Ojeda, her novel Chamanes electricos en la fiesta del sol and her short story collection Las voladoras in the O section.

I loved (and previously recommended) Ojeda's 2018 novel Mandibula, in which the violently gendered psychological horror of Annelise's invented "white god" mythos are disguised and contained in a shell of creepypasta tropes and posh school uniforms. And while at the time of writing I am only two stories deep into Las voladoras, a collection from 2020 (published by Páginas de Espuma and apparently yet to be translated in English), from what I can tell, there is no disguise or protective coating involved here.

Shorn of the niceties and hypocrisy of urban modernity that frame and canalize the horrors of Mandíbula, these first two stories are set against a rural, more folkloric Andean backdrop, where the horrors flow freely in a profusion and confusion of fluids, sweat and honey and milk and period blood that washes over the characters, slakes their thirst, and in some cases, carries them away like a flood. The titular story of the collection is based on a folk belief in the Carchi province of Ecuador, whereby women are susceptible to entering into a magical trance at night, going out onto the roofs of their houses with honey slathered onto their underarms, and flying off into the night. And in “Sangre coagulada”, we meet a poor unfortunate girl being raised by her grandmother, where her chores include taking care of the animals and to “help cook up the remedies that make the girls sick.” She's obsessed with, well, if you know your Spanish or other Romance languages you can probably figure it out from the title, and she keeps a mental catalog of the different shades of red that blood can be. The girl’s mother abandoned her, her grandmother explains, “because your brain is round […] and the ideas walk over top of it.” But

There's people who don't understand. For example, Mommy never cut a cow's throat, never slit open a pig's belly. She doesn’t know that the heads roll in circles, and bleed muscle-red blood.

Clay-red blood.

Wine-red blood.

You get the sense early on that things aren't gonna work out so well but this girl, and yet despite everything, they kind of do, in their way? Albeit in a “black-cherry red, cranberry red” way? Anyway I hope this books appears in English one day so that most of you reading this newsletter can read these stories as well.¹