Review of Leo Rein, “Yet Another Unforgettable Luncheon,” Flash Fiction Online 144 (September 2025): 18-21 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
This story is like what would happen if you took an entire season’s worth of “Murder, She Wrote” episodes and crammed them into a 20 minute show: Completely frenetic, but rather hilarious.
Review of Guan Un, “The Last Items of the Forgotten Hero, or the Grandchild’s First Dragon,” Flash Fiction Online 144 (September 2025): 13-16 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
Awww, this was one of the sweetest, most adorable little stories that I’ve read in a long time. If you need something beautiful to make you feel a bit better about the world, read this.
(First published in Worlds of Possibility, 2023).
Review of Nadia Radovich, “Silence, in the Doorway, With the Gun,” Flash Fiction Online 144 (September 2025): 7-12 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
As a medievalist, I thought that the most exciting thing about this story, for me, was going to be finding out that the Roman de Silence mentioned in the opening paragraph is real. The roman itself is so fascinating that I figured it would be a hard ask for Radovich’s story to be more intriguing than the real thing.
Well, I shouldn’t have been so pessimistic. The story about the story was great.
Review of Eleanor Lennox, “The Color of Things,” Flash Fiction Online 143 (August 2025): 26-29 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
There isn’t anything particularly speculative about this story (as happens occasionally with FFO), but that’s okay, I still enjoyed it. I love it when a story has a certain line that just jumps out at you, when you know exactly what the author means with it. When I read “She only knew she couldn’t bear to hurt Craig. She was a Midwesterner…” (p. 27) I went, ohhhhhh, yeahhhhh, I know exactly what Laura is feeling.
Review of Stephen Granade, “Dislocated,” Flash Fiction Online 143 (August 2025): 23-25 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
There was a very hopeful thread in this story, a thread entwined about the fact that even in the depths of awfulness humanity still knows how to band together in the form of support groups — whether it’s groups like AA in the real world or Nicola’s teleportation sickness support ground in Granade’s story — which left me feeling quite comforted, actually, considering how objectively depressing the story was. (The extremely delightful ending didn’t hurt, that’s for sure.)
Review of Lauren Kardos, “The Body Electric,” Flash Fiction Online 143 (August 2025): 20-22 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
This was a sad, depressing love story.
Review of Angela James, “I Was Made For Loving You,” Flash Fiction Online 143 (August 2025): 16-19 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
This was a very strange story — made even more strange for me because I didn’t know who Gene Simmons was, and for about two pages confused him with Richard Simmons before I stopped to look him up on wikipedia.
That being said, I’m not sure the story would’ve been all that much less strange if I had known who he was from the start!
Review of Anna Clark, “No Laughter in a Vacuum,” Flash Fiction Online 143 (August 2025): 12-15 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
Ellen — described by her ex-girlfriend as a personality vacuum all the way down — secures a job that exploits this: She absorbs other people’s social defects so they can more successfully navigate their lives. As we (the readers) get to see what social defects it is that her clients choose for her to erase, the story becomes a more and more uncomfortable read.
On one level, this is a story of masking, and it’s such a real and raw and realistic story of masking, I almost wanted to put a content note at the start of this review, not necessarily to warn people off from the story, but at least to warn them of it. I think the ending is intended to be happy one, but I was too caught up in what came before to find any joy in the resolution.
Review of Lisa Fox, “Textures,” Flash Fiction Online 143 (August 2025): 7-10 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
This is a story of love, and weddings, and memories. It’s sweet and short and sad, and full of beautiful metaphors such as “If love had a texture, it would be satin” (p. 7).
But — Annie, the main character, says of this metaphor,
In thirty-five years of working with brides, I knew which marriages would last by the way they responded to my metaphor (p. 7).
I wonder what she would think of my reaction, which is that satin wrinkles easily and the wrinkles are almost impossible to iron out!
Review of Kawai Shen, “The Doll’s Boy,” khōréō 4, no. 4 (2025) — Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
Content note: Explicit body horror; non-consensual sex.
Reading this story was an extremely voyeuristic — and hence distinctly uncomfortable — experience. Definitely well-written, but nothing something I could comfortably recommend to anyone to read.
SFF Reviews