It's a Jumble

  Very late, but here are some stories I read and loved in the last months of 2025—a mix of older stories and new.   “Wolf Moon, Antler Moon” by A.C. Wise in Reactor (published in January 2025) Wolves have always ranged on the outside of the town, snapping jaws at its ragged edges. Sometimes they kill to cull. Sometimes they kill to eat. Sometimes they protect the town from worse things, older things, and newer ones as well. But the town would rather look away from the wolves, because the doe-girls’ radiant magic is so much prettier. Was. Now the doe-girls are gone.   A small town governed by a balance of unspoken powers. Wolves in the hills, and doe-girls in the form of high school students—beautiful and shining. But there are also human hunters, disrupting the balance of power with their greed. And there is Merrow, a high school girl who is a different kind of protector, inheritor to her grandmother’s power. What is Merrow—a semi-outcast, always on the ed...

  "I don’t want to reject confessional writing outright, I wrote to you, but it’s a tricky mode for works received as black or feminist texts. . . I’m less interested in “what happened to you” than the transmission of a feeling, something breathable and contagious, a vast, raw, untethered emotion, that’s how I want to be seen and how I want the writers I love to be seen, not for the self but for the ecstasy, the writerly ecstasy, caught and passed on like an electric discharge.”     --Sofia Samatar, from Opacities

  Kristin Ten expertly entwines humor and dread in this collection of strange, unsettling stories. Paper dolls come to life and take revenge; a computer game teaches a strange, possibly demonic language; a water dragon is entrapped by a cheating card player, and a girls’ volleyball team is caught in a horrifying cult dynamic. Children’s games and folklore form the basis of many of these stories; this book is stepped in the 90s’ milieu. In Ten’s hands, nostalgia takes a sideways turn: the familiar and mundane are just slightly askew, or recast in a dramatically new light. A childhood camp legend comes to life in “Bunny Ears” and childhood games become the basis for officially approved methods of predicting love in “Approved Methods of Love Divination in the First-Rate City of Dushagorod.” Ten’s stories explore issues of identity and immigration. Most of all, they examine the experience of girlhood and womanhood in the 90s and beyond: the fierce adolescent need to belong, the anxie...