Review of Phoenix Alexander, “Nancy Shreds the Clouds,” Flash Fiction Online (August 2023): 11-14 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
Content note: Domestic abuse.
This was a strange little story. Starting off as it did, the story of a lonesome, friendless child who quickly learned that being good meant being alone, it ended up not in some righteous justification of taking the high road, but in a raw, sordid triumph.
Review of M. C. Benner Dixon, “Let the Field Burn,” Flash Fiction Online (August 2023): 7-9 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
Content note: Death of a parent.
There was something really beautiful in this story about just how ordinary it was. Clearing out a house after the death of a parent. The teen who’d been co-opted into mowing the lawn. The minutiae of life and death. But one of the best thing about fiction, about telling stories, is how the ordinary becomes extraordinary. Dixon nailed that, in this lovely little tale.
Review of Jennifer Mace, “Upon What Soil They Fed,” Flash Fiction Online (March 2023): 20-22 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
This was a creepy little story about the unexpected things a door-to-door salesman might encounter.
(First published in Syntax & Salt January 2020).
Review of Marisca Pichette, “Wonderful Wounds Await You,” Flash Fiction Online (March 2023): 16-19 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
This was an interesting story which was a “not for me” one because of its use of second-person narration. If this doesn’t bother you, then you’ll probably enjoy it (unless body horror isn’t your thing.)
Review of Dafydd McKimm, “Power is Love in the Devil’s Eye,” Flash Fiction Online (March 2023): 11-15 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
Salacious, graphic, and humorful, but unfortunately rather too relentlessly heteronormative for my tastes.
Review of Matthew F. Amati, “About Her Bones So Bleak and Bare,” Flash Fiction Online (March 2023): 7-10 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
Content note: Death of a child.
This story is gruesome, violent, and haunting.
Review of Wen Wen Yang, “The Fox Spirit’s Retelling,” Flash Fiction Online (May 2023): 20-22 — Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
This was a lovely little ghost tale, full of hauntings and spirits and stories that never get fully told.
(Originally published in Remapping Wonderland: Classic Fairytales Retold by People of Color, January 2021.)
Review of Kurt Newton, “The Invisible,” Flash Fiction Online (May 2023): 16-19 — Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
This story can be summed up “coping mechanisms for past trauma gone wrong”. At first, the idea seems great, but knowing that this issue of FFO is all about horror, you also know from the start that things are all going to go wrong. It was delicious finding out how.
Review of Sarah Cline, “Skin the Teeth,” Flash Fiction Online (May 2023): 11-14 — Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
Gory, creepy, disturbing: those three words sum up this story. It’s crazy cat lady taken to an entirely differently level!
Review of H. V. Patterson, “Unexplained,” Flash Fiction Online (May 2023): 7-10 — Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
Patterson’s story is the opening one in a horror-themed issue of FFO, and while the immediate scene is of a woman who has suddenly lost a finger, this isn’t a story about gore and body horror. Rather, the terror is much more psychological: No doctor believes that she ever used to have 10 fingers.
I’m pretty sure every woman (and probably many men) has had the experience of telling someone about something that has happened to her, medical or otherwise, and not being believed. Patterson taps into this fear deftly, and the ending is a killer.
SFF Reviews