Short Stories 366:224 — “Inscribed,” by Craig Laurance Gidney

I'm trying to remember if I've read another story that upped the creepy factor in a similar way to "Inscribed," and I'm drawing a blank. Found in Skin Deep Magic: Short Fiction, this story is interspersed with excerpts from "Mercurial Magic: the Language of Hermes and Thoth," by Byron Davies, the white (and, soon revealed, …

Short Stories 366:223 — “A Scent of Roses,” by Catherine Lundoff

If you've been around this blog at all in the last few years, you know I love a queer re-telling. I love writing them (I try to do one every holiday season, even, a tradition I started with my retelling of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer), and I adore reading them. It's not difficult to understand …

Short Stories 366:222 — “Difficult at Parties,” by Carmen Maria Machado

Oh wow, this story. Before I start, I just want to be one hundred precent clear that if you've not already picked up a copy of Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado, you should grab a copy. I'll wait. Okay? Good. "Difficult at Parties" is the final story in the collection, and …

Short Stories 366:221 — “The Rainbow Collection,” by Nathan Azinger

Very often in science fiction set in the far future, the only entertainment pieces that seem to make it through from our contemporary point in time are so often things that we already consider classics: classical music, for example. This latest story from The Clan Chronicles: Tales from Plexis had me pretty much grinning from …

Short Stories 366:220 — “The Dealey Paradox,” by Brendan DuBois

I really enjoyed this story from Crime Travel, an anthology that marries crime stories with time travel, in that it tackled a conceit you often hear bandied about whenever time travel comes up: if time travel ever became possible, certainly the horrible things that happened wouldn't have happened: someone would have come back to fix …

Short Stories 366:219 — “Bayou,” by Bryan Washington

As a lover of speculative fiction, I think I maybe had less of a jolt reading this story from Lot: Stories than perhaps others might. Prior to this the stories have all been grounded in a very contemporary setting, but this tale opens with someone finding a dying chupacabra (which seems to have died by …