This story appeared in Lily Lit Review in April 2006. There’s a tradition of bankers, doctors, and insurance executives being secret poets (think T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Robert Lowell, respectively)…
Tag: fiction
Among the Moabites
This is kind of a nasty little story. It floated around in the slush pile of several literary and horror publications who rejected it as just a bit too dark before it…
After Ice Cream
This little story was, I think, my first publication of the 21st century, appearing Eyeshot in 2004. Do you remember Eyeshot, webzines, and the Internet when it was weird and fun and…
Excavating the Submission History of a Story
In preparing a bunch of old stories for publication here, on Substack, and on Medium, I discovered that WritersDB, the website that I used to track my story submissions back in the…
Famine
I’m digging into my scattered archives and polishing up some old stories, some previously published and some not. I don’t actually recall if this one was ever published; I loaded it to…
“Learning to Talk” by Hilary Mantel
Not having read Mantel’s memoir, “Giving Up the Ghost,” I was a little befuddled by some of these stories – they return again and again to similar settings and situations but with…
“Blodsuger” by John Langan
All of the stories in Ellen Datlow’s anthology “Screams From the Dark” are great – she is far and away the best collector of horror, science fiction, and fantasy stories working today…
The Girl From Rawblood by Catriona Ward
The story of a cursed family is told through several voices in three different time periods – around 1840, around 1890, and in the aftermath of the First World War.
“Ravissante” by Robert Aickman
A story within a story – a man inherits the papers of a painter of fantastical scenes, and finds a memoir of the painter’s visit with the widow of another painter of…
“The Game of Rat and Dragon” by Cordwainer Smith
Humans and cats form a psychic bond to fight against monsters lurking in the deep space between stars. This is a subtle and intriguing story of interspecies communication that manages to give…