Archives

CHARLENE ELSBY RECOMMENDS: Books from the Void

January 21, 2025

Since I went to VoidCon 2023, I’ve pretty much been catching up on the books I acquired there. And the problem only got worse after VoidCon 2024. Organized by Evan Dean Shelton and Edwin Callihan, VoidCon is a curated convention for weird fiction and weird horror, including literature, art and music. Art’s that, like, “wouldn’t it be nice if it found commercial success” but nobody’s expecting it to. The void aesthetic is irreverent and fun while dark and existentially horrid, and militantly encourages the participation of diverse voices on their own terms. So as an artificial way of imposing order

THE SLEEPING BANKER by Matthew Binder

January 20, 2025

The factory closed the week before Christmas. The owner had moved his operations to Bangladesh. Emanuel had spent eleven years on the assembly line. It was the only job he knew. Marta, his wife, could no longer cut hair. Her condition made her hands tremble to the point that her clients had begun to complain about nicks on their necks and ears. They were three months behind on rent, the electricity was shut off. Their kids were eating crackers and trekking through the snow with holes in their shoes. Emanuel had once had luck betting on football matches. That ended,

THE CHILLED SUNLIGHT by Steve Gergley

January 19, 2025

In town there were a series of murders. Each attack occurred beneath the almond tree spiking through the pavement in the center of Second Ave. No one seemed to care. Everyone walked the sidewalks as if nothing strange had happened. They chatted about the weather and watched the mailman wander the knotted maze of the streets. They met up for brunch and dinner and played games with their children and dogs in the park. My wife and I were terrified. We drove to the supermarket using an alternate route each day. We avoided our friends on the weekends in fear

AUG STONE RECOMMENDS: Steve Aylett, Kevin Maloney, Madeline Cash, John Patrick Higgins

January 16, 2025

Steve Aylett, The Book Lovers (Snowbooks, 2024) Steve Aylett is back with a new novel that could very well be his best work yet. In The Book Lovers, Aylett’s fireworks are at maximum intensity – dazzling, dizzying, and coming straight at you. Launched from one of the all-time great opening lines – ‘A book is like you and me – glued to a spine and doing its best’ – the text is hilarious, profound, and just a delight to engage with. Almost every sentence is rich, full of meaning, and contains enough avenues of thought to construct a city

NOBODY’S DAUGHTER by Ryan-Ashley Anderson

January 15, 2025

I was almost five years old, it was Christmas day, and I knew something was wrong because I’d gotten everything I’d asked for: a blue and white-checked gingham romper with buttons up the front; black, mid-calf cowboy boots with red stitching; and, most surprisingly, a fluffy black puppy with a bright white chest whom I would come to call Kentucky. I had never been to Kentucky and am not even sure how I’d learned the name, but I’d tested out several words from my dog name list and determined this was the best one. A dog’s name should ring out

THE HAUNTED MEMORY OF A DEAD PLACE: An Interview with Derek Fisher by Rebecca Gransden

January 14, 2025

Is there something up with modern dread? Derek Fisher’s enigmatic collection Container (With an X Books, 2024) strokes the lid of contemporary malaise, and teases the release on stories that simmer like a broiling pressure cooker. This is writing cast adrift on strange currents, Fisher’s domain that of diseased architecture, where dark impulses meet bad vibes. I talked to Derek about this unsettling and dynamic collection. Rebecca Gransden: When did you write your first short story? Has your approach to the short story form evolved over time? Derek Fisher: Yooo. Hi Rebecca, my fellow Lizard Brain! My first short

NUNS & ROSES by Ana Carrete

January 13, 2025

A nun was cloistered in a convent near me. I knew her. She was the Mother Superior. She was the main bitch. Top energy. She left that cloistered convent and moved to the Midwest. I was visiting the Midwest for poetry and to fuck a writer I’d been sexting with for months. I waxed my pussy right before I went on that trip and that was a mistake. My boyfriend dropped me off at the airport. I took a pill to fall asleep on the plane. When the plane landed, my head was resting on the stranger next to me.

NOT HANDLED WITH CARE by M.A. Boswell

January 11, 2025

After Olivia tore out of the parking lot, Hyundai stuffed with all the nice shit from their place, Josh mixed batter and slammed it into a bruised Teflon pan. He’d survived on easy food before, when other exes ruined his life. Josh flipped the pancake, watched it coil into a lopsided heap. Earlier, Olivia changed the title of their shared playlist from Babe to You’re a literal adult child, deleted everything except one Taylor Swift breakup song. Josh rammed his spatula under the wreckage, realizing how bad this would be. The pancake grinned from the plate, torn and ugly, but

PEGGY by Daisy Alioto

January 10, 2025

Peggy got down on her knees and asked God to send her a good man. She thought she had one in Jack but her friends told her that he wasn’t a good man, or if he was, he was good in the way that men are good which is different from the way that women are good. Something about the difference between a deal and a contract. Peggy thought all goodness was the same and maybe the goodness in Jack was hiding. For six months Peggy and Jack had dinner once a week until one day he stopped answering her

David Simmons Recommends: Brian Evenson, Charlene Elsby, Kelby Losack & J David Osborne

January 9, 2025

Brian Evenson, Good Night, Sleep Tight (Coffee House Press, 2024) Brian Evenson is my favorite author of all time so I make it a policy to read whatever he writes. Some of you may already know Evenson as the innovator and pioneer of the this-house-we-just-moved-into-has-more-windows-on-the-outside-than-on-the-inside-so-now-I’m-going-to-burn-it-down-with-my-family-still-inside horror genre. Whether it’s the crime noir-religious cult-horror-mystery Last Days or the schizophrenic-Mormon-fever dream of The Open Curtain, all he drops are bangers. His short story collections are my favorite though. Fugue State and Windeye are two of the best collections I have ever read. So you already know I was too hype to get