REVIEW: “Silence, in the Doorway, With the Gun” by Nadia Radovich

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.

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REVIEW: “No Laughter in a Vacuum” by Anna Clark

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.

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REVIEW: “Kolumbo 1619: Choose Your Own Adventure” by KÁNYIN Olorunnisola

Review of KÁNYIN Olorunnisola, “Kolumbo 1619: Choose Your Own Adventure,” khōréō 4, no. 4 (2025) — Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Content note: Racism, police brutality, murder.

This is a “choose your own adventure” through systematic racism in early 20th C America, over and over and over again. It’s the sort of story that never in a million years could I have ever written, because it is so far removed from my own (privileged!) experiences: I can only ever hope to get a glimpse of understanding of these experiences by reading about them. It’s a tough read, but I’m glad I had the opportunity to do so.

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REVIEW: “Oathbinder” by L. Fox

Review of L. Fox, “Oathbinder,” Luna Station Quarterly 62 (June 2025): 303-319 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

There was something about Fox’s use of language in the opening pages — how the words sort of slipped and rolled sideways — that was purely magical. The feeling of the prose translated, for me, into a feeling of the world itself, slightly strange, slightly confusing, full of depths that I definitely couldn’t quite understand. This is probably my favorite story of the entire issue.

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REVIEW: “Ends and Means” by Ana Wesley

Review of Ana Wesley, “Ends and Means,” Luna Station Quarterly 62 (June 2025): 261-281 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

It’s another post-apocalyptic story, two women desperately running and trying to stay safe, never sure where they will sleep, what they will eat, who will betray them next. There’s been a lot of these such stories lately, it feels like, and one thing I’ve realized lately is how few post-apocalyptic settings ever really go deep into worldbuilding. The apocalypses are rarely articulated, the enemies often feel interchangeable, the central characters — while varied and interesting in themselves — too seem like they could be swapped from one setting to another without their stories fundamentally changing.

All this to say: There’s been so many stories of this ilk in recent years that it’s now going to take something special for one to stand out for me. It took Wesley’s story a good five pages to get going, but then I finally started getting glimpse of something at least a little bit different: post-apocalyptic fantasy, rather than SF.

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REVIEW: “A Bedtime of Fire, Alchemy, and Ice” by JM Cyrus

Review of JM Cyrus, “A Bedtime of Fire, Alchemy, and Ice,” Luna Station Quarterly 62 (June 2025): 243-258 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Solo parenting a gaggle of young kids while you’ve got experimental research notes you need to write up is never an easy thing — whether or not your research is magical! But Morwedd’s wife is away, so she’s got no choice but to make the balance work.

What I loved most about this story was its portrayal of the sheer *joy* of parenting young children. Yes, under-5s are exhausting and relentless and complicated to parent, especially when there’s more than one of them; but so often it feels like people don’t talk often enough about how much fun it is to be a parent, how joyful it is. So this story just made me happy.

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REVIEW: “Entropy in a Fruit Bowl” by Nicole Lynn

Review of Nicole Lynn, “Entropy in a Fruit Bowl,” Flash Fiction Online 140 (May 2025): 11-14 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Content note: Death of a parent, physical violence.

Apparently the trick to learning necromancy is: Start small. But love that only existed asymmetrically can never be resurrected once it is dead — these are the two lessons of this short, exceedingly sad, story.

(First published in The Arcanist October 2022.)

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