Later, you’ll claim there were warnings. Unusual bird calls. That double rainbow you snapped for Instagram. A knowing gleam in the eyes of the hibachi waitress. To make sense of a thing is to make it your own, and…
Shelly died first. Some combination of tuberculosis and an ancient family curse. Then her ghost killed Dan, strangled him with his own bed-curtains. They both agreed to leave Good Boy alive—the game is Ghost Children, not Ghost Dogs. Shelly…
When the sun sets, the whole neighborhood glows red and I taste blood around my teeth. Maybe I’m not flossing enough. I can’t afford to go to the dentist; I can’t pay someone else to clean up my mess.…
Essay by Jesse Motte • In a period of world history characterized largely by mandated physical distancing, Chloe N. Clark’s debut collection, Collective Gravities, is an important reference for navigating inner and outer spaces. The collection, driven by character…
Most nights, Morgan lies awake thinking about cutting off her sister’s finger. The extra one on Angela’s left hand, the one she calls her angel finger. It could be said these thoughts make Morgan a bad person. Sinning in…
By Geoffrey Miller • A different woman character narrates each of the trio of novellas in Yoko Ogawa’s collection The Diving Pool. In the opening, titular piece there’s Aya, a school-aged girl living at a countryside orphanage run by…
I prepare my tools for the excavation. Placing the suspect object onto a sterilized operating surface and unpackaging fresh picks and scalpels. It is 4.3 x 7 x 1.2 inches. A small rectangular stack of papers bound together. With…
Everyone expected me to take my mother’s eyes. I had a right to take what I wanted, and her eyes were legendary. She’d taken them from her mother, and her mother had taken them from her mother. They were…
I got laid off from the realty company, and then the foreclosure followed hard. Reya absorbed the shocks better than me. She was still working, managing the liquor store. She was the one who found us a new place to…
I’m currently working on a book of horror stories called Vampire Radio. Horror was where I started out in childhood, listening to Alfred Hitchcock anthologies on the turntable with giant headphones at my local library in Wisconsin, devouring Poe and Kafka in the high school library, and watching Twin Peaks with my mom. Horror suits reactionary eras, like the 1980s, when I grew up, and I think the genre fits in with our current predicament rather well. The state of being afraid weirdly connects Americans across the spectrum right now – people who otherwise think they don’t share anything in common. Everyone is anxious, and this universal state of fear puts people into situations where they can be manipulated more easily. The horror genre is a double-edged sword in this regard, since it contributes to the climate of fear but also can offer the chance to confront and challenge our worst fears in a fictional space that makes it safer, perhaps, or more distanced, at least. All this sounds more like theme than craft, but I guess theme is always a hidden or unconscious aspect of craft. I would add that writers don’t set out to create concepts or messages, of course, and yet the work-space inevitably feels invaded by the barometric pressure of the wider atmosphere in which we work. I don’t think that’s anything to fear. Regarding “Parenthood,” I’d like to thank Liz Bradfield for an anecdote that inspired this story.
J. M. TYREE is the coauthor, with Michael McGriff of the story collection Our Secret Life in the Movies (A Strange Object), an NPR Best Book of 2014. He teaches at VCUarts and is Nonfiction Editor at New England Review. His most recent book is a collection of essays, Vanishing Streets – Journeys in London (Stanford University Press).
