Short fiction recs! April-June 2025

 

Due to personal matters, I was not able to get as much short fiction read as usual these past few months.  But here are some short stories I did read and love.

 

“Haunting Beauty” by T.K. Rex in Uncharted Magazine

The American Hotel looks and feels like it was built right after the 1906 earthquake, San Francisco’s worst day ever. The ceiling has one long, thin crack that makes me nervous, and white latex paint over decades of lead smoothing the edges of the carved molding all around the ceiling and the floor. A brass chandelier holds candle-flame-shaped incandescent bulbs, about a third burned out, and the carpets are…carpets.

 

The American Hotel is in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, and has seen much better days. But a hungry model needs to eat, and so agrees to meet a photographer there for a photoshoot. There, the model (and reader) learn that not all hauntings are terrifying or unwelcome. The American Hotel has secrets to share, but secrets that are precious and good . . This is a slow, gentle piece that shines with warmth, that showcases beauty amid decay and glimpses of hope and love even in times of oppression and despair. Lovely work.  

 

“The Life and Times of Alavira the Great as Written by Titos Pavlou and Reviewed byTwo Lifelong Friends” by Eugenia Triantafyllou in Uncanny Magazine

After being publicly called out by Lefteris_Loves_Fantasy for my slow reading, I am finally posting my review. Yes, I did start this book first and got Lefteris into it later but I just wanted to savor the experience. Do you ever get that feeling when you read the first few pages of a book and you just know it is going to be super important for you? That’s me and The Missing Hill. 

 

Oh, this is wonderful. It’s a story that’s structured as a set of Goodread reviews by a pair of teenage friends, and it’s utterly delightful. I love the way the teens’ relationship and character arcs are revealed entirely through the medium of book reviews. I love the way the YA fantasy series under review seems initially bonkers through Lefteris’ plot-heavy (and spoiler-heavy) reviews. . . but then Maria’s reviews shed an entirely different light on the series.  This story is warm, funny, generous, poignant, and has just the right amount of darkness. It’s a story about how books can change you, and also about how books change as the reader changes and grows. It’s about how you can dismiss a book at the age of eighteen or so, and then come back to it years later and find depths and meaning that you didn’t recognize earlier. . . Depths and meaning which were just waiting to be seen when you were ready for it.

 

“In My Country” by Thomas Ha in Clarkesworld

There can be no ambiguity to the art. It must be clear.

Everyone from the First Citizen down to each person in each neighborhood knew that stories had to be clear. Anything said had to be one thing or the other thing. Pick one thing or the other thing. So long as it was not an in-between thing. The in-between things were where problems lay.

 

A story about those who would eliminate ambiguity from all art and expression, and much more besides. A brilliant story --powerful, unsettling, and deeply resonant with our times.

 

“The Witch-Doctor’s Revenge” by Nuzo Onoh in Nightmare Magazine

As we continue our journey, I notice that every hut and hamlet is littered with fetish objects, chicken feathers, and effigies of various pagan deities. I am not much surprised by the strange sight. Father O’Brien has already informed me that the native problem is bad in Ukari; that their addiction to fetish superstitions is great; that the church is facing stiff resistance from this particular village and that only the threat of an armed invasion had forced a compromise with the community—they must give the church the land it demanded and send one child from each family to the school and Sunday Mass.

Mr. Bassey has just been appointed headmaster for a new Catholic missionary school in an Igbo village. He is Igbo himself, but also a devout Catholic and proud to serve the new colonial regime in bringing what he sees as light and knowledge to his own people. But the witch-doctor who had previously lived in the village has other ideas. . . What follows is a fantastically horrific, gruesome and most satisfying tale of a battle of faiths, reanimated corpses, dead vultures, the humbling of a proud man and a mysterious, silver-eyed little girl.   

 

“Highway 1, Past Hope” by Maria Haskins in The Deadlands

Layla rises like a breath in winter from the hollow beneath the black cottonwoods beside the river, shrugging off the blanket of dirt and leaves and centipedes she slept beneath. She should dissipate. She should waver and dissolve. She should ascend and alight. Instead, she starts gathering her bones.

 

Layla is a ghost gathering her bones by the river. Penni’s car has just run out of gas on the highway. These two women’s stories –one dead, one alive--intersect in this dark, shivery little tale. A tale of bones, violence, and retribution, with a most satisfying ending. A darkly lovely tale.

 

“Barbershops of the Floating City” by Angela Liu in Uncanny Magazine

You’ve heard the rumors. How your mother used to cut hair in the Floating City. How she even cut the Founder’s hair once. You think of that man you’ve only ever seen in textbooks and in oil paintings, the face of a god. You think of how your mom touched, even kissed that face at some point.

 

“Your mama lost the sight, but not the hunger,” Fran says, flattening the frizzy hairs poking up from the back of your head.

 

A story about a world where certain people have the power to release memories when they cut another’s hair. The narrator’s mother once had this power, and cut hair for people in the Floating City; she could see the memory streams in a client’s hair and choose from among them, allowing her clients to relive their favorite moments. But the mother has lost that gift, and now she sits empty-eyed at home in the poverty of the Town Towers, and it is her daughter who is training to cut hair. A strange, melancholy piece that slowly unspools, revealing character and plot bit by bit, brimming with loss and grief. I love the way Angela Liu writes mother-and-daughter relationships: the complexity and pain and complicated love.

 

“The Boar’s Wife” by  Madison Jozefiak in The Orange & the Bee

Long ago in a forest with no name, a Witch came upon a Wild Boar foraging in the brush. He was a beast so large that upon his back one could have built a hut for a family of five to comfortably live in, and the Witch thought she would capture and enchant him, for with his strength he should make a fine servant.

 

An absolutely enchanting fairy tale of nested and linked fairy tales, which plays delightfully on fairy tale conventions and form. Clever women, a hard-drinking boar, princes and princesses and a series of mistaken assumptions. . . This one is a delight.

 

“The Cephalophore” by Thomas Ha in The Dark

He visited me in the night, carrying his head.

Dead men would sometimes visit the city this way.

 

Thomas Ha knows how to open a story. He knows how to end one, too. A tale about a sleepless city where the Executed do not stay dead, where guilt and helplessness can hollow a man out. Like the other Thomas Ha story on this list, “In My Country,” this is a tale about someone just trying to survive in an oppressive, authoritarian  world, and like “In My Country,” it is a tale that is darkly resonant with our times (and relevant for any time).

  

“A Week at the Raven Feather Salon” by Carrie Vaughn in Lightspeed Magazine

The cedar floor made the open-air foyer smell like a forest. Stray breezes came in and rustled the scrolls hanging from various posts. Screens could be put up in inclement weather, when the smell and sound of falling rain soothed patrons. Beyond the foyer, tiers of flooring held tables, sofas, and lounges, far enough apart to give each a sense of privacy. People naturally spoke softly, with reverence.

 

Sparrow was once a captain in the army, using her magic in service of war and the defense of her country. But now she is done with fighting and taking orders. She’s retired, and uses her magic arts in service of the Raven Feather Salon, a magical place of peace and rest that she’s opened, where the magic arts of poetry, painting, and music are used to bring comfort and joy rather than bloodshed. Until a former colleague from the military turns up, asking for help. . . This story is the very definition of “cozy” fiction; it’s as warm and soothing as the beautiful salon it describes. There’s a bit of darkness lurking at the corners, and a moral question asked; yet while the stakes are real, the story retains a gentle tone. I particularly love the magic system described here, and love for art and skilled creative work that shines in this story.  

 

“Because I Held His Name Like a Key” by Aimee Ogden in Strange Horizons

When I met the young Mr. Turing, I had not yet ascended as Autumn’s King. Nowadays it has become fashionable for the sons and daughters of the lesser fey gentry to improve their position in the shifting hierarchy of the Courts by virtue of intrigue, scandal, and the naked blade; but in those times, it was the custom to advance one’s position through the collection of human bagatelles. Poets, polymaths, politicians—all manner of mortal myrmidons who flourished, in turn, during their time under the butterfly-bright attention of this Court or that one.

 

An absolutely gorgeous Faerie tale, in which a lord of Faerie begins an affair with Alan Turing, the famous mathematician/code-breaker/computer scientist/polymath of our real world. Rich and elegant and strange, this story is told in evocative prose that conjures up the wonders and dangers of Faerie. . . and then the dangers and darkening shadows of our own real world, as Alan Turing moves through the darkness of World War II and more. The way Aimee Ogden weaves together these two strands—the real and the unreal, fiction and biography, Faerie and Earth—is a marvel. It’s not a story that can end happily, though. Gorgeous, rich, and heartbreaking.