*SPOILER ALERT* This review contains plot details of Apastoral: A Mistopia.

Published on July 15, 2024 by corona/samizdat.

Apastoral: A Mistopia by Lee Thompson is hilarious and horrifying from stem to stern, a wildly imaginative meditation on the absurd nature of incarceration. As stark as that may sound, Thompson subverts the subject matter with magical scenarios and rhythmic language that resolves like a fable. Apastoral is gritty and harsh, at its heart is a violent crime and a very violent State, but it also contains love, loyalty, and the innocence of friendship. Thompson weaves impressionistic prose into the narrative, creating an existential point of view for a pantheon of characters. The result is a story that feels lived, rather than recorded.

In Apastoral, particularly pernicious criminals, are no longer locked in small concrete cells. State authorities have decided that the most dangerous among us are better relegated to the bodies of livestock, literally. The Constock Program (convict + livestock) transplants the eyes and brains of unlucky defendants into pigs, cows, goats, and chickens. Rather than wallow in grey dungeons, convicts roam vast, fortified farmlands—trapped still, but placated by their docile existence and environment.

The casual cruelty of the Constock program is buttressed by absurd bureaucracy and mad, giggling bureaucrats. Far from any innocent intent, the program has evolved and is fitted with uproarious live broadcast show trials, elaborate psychoanalysis/change-of-life counseling, and a civilian population making bets on convict fates—hungry for the grim entertainment of it all.

It is within this context that we are introduced to Apastoral’s protagonist, Bones, whose participation in a badly botched jewel heist has damned him to life as a wooly sheep. “You’re a wobbly table in a pub, Bones, accept it.” This observation from Bones’ Constock program psychologist represents the State’s attempt to help Bones (and society as a whole) reckon with what they plan to do to him. The extreme psychological and medial conditioning, the experimental surgery, and trapping a human mind in a farm animal are all warranted—excused—because Bones is hopeless.

Thompson roundly calls out all sides of the conflict; the brutal system’s hypocrisy and depravity are laid bare for the reader, and society’s passive and active participation in the farcical show makes the madness even more realistic—some froth at the mouth for news of the next convict transplant, while others vow to burn the whole horrifying system down. PETABBY, an ineffectual anti-Constock resistance group, provides a flawed but ethical reckoning for the program with direct action in the form of clumsy prisoner rescues.

Through PETABBY and characters imprisoned by the Constock program, Thompson illustrates the tragedy of resistance against overwhelming forces, namely that if good people/animals allow it, resistance will become the monster it sought to destroy. “…activists, they’re boring. They just spew what everyone’s been telling them. They’re no different from the lawyers and bankers and cops they make fun of.” The inmates and society as a whole are formed and affected by the Constock program: the inmates parrot the authoritarianism that imprisoned them by devolving into petty dictatorships, and the free citizenry gleefully take up their charge as deputized guards and judges.

There are no sedentary characters in Apastoral; human and post-human-livestock alike are vibrant, even when their time in focus is short. The present and recent past are skillfully intertwined throughout the tale, expanding the world and conflict without blurting out the important parts prematurely. When the reader finally gets a peek at the cause of all the trouble (Bones’ life, friends, and especially his crime), it lands as a gift, necessary at just that moment. The book’s excellent pacing is to blame.

Simply calling Apastoral dystopian is lazy. It is dystopian, of course, but it also reflects a dire reality: plenty of people already live in an absurd carceral system. You may even recognize a few elements of Constock that feel close to home. These systems vary widely at every border but are unfailingly designed to pick up certain people and leave the really big criminals for public office. Within Apastoral’s blooming myriad of moral quandaries, it murmurs from the rafters, be on guard, the absurd becomes the maniacal with a slip of the pen.

*SPOILER ALERT* This review contains plot details of Play|House.

Published April 2024 by Northwestern University Press.

To say that Jorrell Watkins’ debut poetry collection Play|House contends with the troubling reality of being black in America would be an understatement that doesn’t do his work justice. Not only does Watkins unpack what it means for black boyhood and black psyche to succumb to drugs, guns, invisibility, and other intimate brutalities fostered by the U.S.—he also cultivates a curation where the poetry and music he cites are in conversation with one another. The music introduces figures such as John Coltrane, Ruth Brown, Nas, and Migos as another avenue Watkins simultaneously projects and confronts his boyhood and manhood while he addresses the historical and current injustices haunting black living. “I’ll play songs for you, something you can get with / we don’t have to talk, let music restore what we built” offers the first poem, “Brotha Speaks.” With language, rhythm, and structure that challenge traditional poetics as much as he challenges readers to bear witness to what he has witnessed, Watkins demonstrates his fearlessness to go for the gut when highlighting the hurt. Amidst his prowess, Watkins refuses to surrender to the violences perpetrated upon black living in America and, instead, celebrates the triumphs that originate from black joy.

With his ambitiousness, Watkins doesn’t ask readers to be patient when interacting with his unique dialect—he dares them to step into the cadence he knows and loves dearly. In “Acquisition: Mothership,” inspired by Parliament-Funkadelic’s “Mothership Connection,” Watkins riffs out, “Under the groove our steps collate minds / Maggot brain culture we kilowatt the bots / Overcharged, bail out systemic headlock / Bypass the rulers, circuit trip this business / One hundred and fifteen claps per minute.” Such language demands a reread, but this is not a criticism of the language itself. Rather, subsequent examinations of passages like this allow for a greater appreciation of Watkins’ deftness as he merges poetic and musical meters with commentary on America’s broken systems and how they’re broken. Watkins strikes just as hard with more conventional storytelling when a memory calls for it. In the poem “Up a Notch,” which follows him and his brother cooking a meal as a metaphor for pain birthed from creation, Watkins writes, “Concoctions made, teaspoons drawn, / which taste bombards the palate? / Jody’s nose bleeds, my throat peels. / [again] Emeril’s jazz band muses / his Cajun creation. Jody froths chili-mucus, / I hack heavy metal.”

Speaking of heavy metal, musical genre dictates both the poems and the three sections they are organized under, “House Below the Heavens,” “Halfway Blues House,” and “TrapHouse.” “House Below the Heavens” pays tribute to the hip-hop album Below the Heavens by Blu & Exile and situates readers within Watkins’ own house below the heavens—namely, insights into his childhood, adolescence, family, and reaching beyond cycles of harm to find black joy in a world that constantly takes it away. Meanwhile, “Halfway Blues House” borrows terminology from a living space known as a halfway house, a living environment that serves as the transition stage between incarceration, drug rehab, or mental health treatment and complete reintegration into independent living in society. The mixing of blues’ melancholy with the concept of the halfway house further juxtaposes Watkins and black living with the liminality imposed upon them. This leaves Watkins to question whether full healing is possible as joy and cycles of harm carry over from the first section. Finally, “TrapHouse” is directly modeled after its namesake, where illicit drugs are sold and used or where clay targets are released for skeet shooting. Here, everything Watkins tackles in previous sections culminates where he most explicitly confronts drug use, gun violence, and oblivion. One of the last poems, “Brotha Moves,” is a no-holding-back rhetoric on trauma sustained from police violence. Watkins recalls the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd and contemplates how he could just as easily be at the other end of an officer’s bullet.

Watkins’ amalgamation of “play” and “house” embodies poetic and personal maturity that not many debut writers can boast they have, especially considering the gravity of the issues and topics he faces. We see this playfulness intertwined with house in every sense of what a house can entail in “Up a Notch.” Similarly, to start “In the House,” Watkins writes, “Welcome to the most dreaded edifice of the living realm / where haunts whelm flesh into gastric muck and vultures / slurp the gutsy gunk. Watch your step.” Phrases like “gastric muck” and “slurp the gutsy gunk” showcase Watkins’ mastery of playing with poetic language while “Watch your step” and other horror-like descriptions like jet bats, a silkworm, and mercury bile paint a picture where escape is desired. In another poem titled “Mean what I say,” Watkins admits, “There’s three-fourths gallon pecan streusel bread / pudding on second shelf right door garage fridge. / Don’t know if nuts are too much, but it’s from / brotha-owned shop cross town.” From streusel bread to the literal haunting of a house, the oscillation between play and house makes the physical and emotional weight of being so close to these contrasting states of existence tangible as Watkins commands our attention from start to finish.

Play|House utilizes poetics and frames music as a muse to conjure a landscape where joy can be power in the face of America’s familiar obsession with cultures of drugs, guns, and invisibilities. This is not to say that joy is an absolute cure. Instead, Watkins poses moments of black joy that can build upon each other as growing triumphs amidst a reality that demands his people’s blood, sweat, and tears. Thus, joy is ultimately one form of survival, and Watkins shows no signs of slowing down in his disruption of hauntings, histories, and hellish systems. He issues his own challenge in “Brotha Moves” when he writes, “I’m not trying to be one seen on dark-mode dusked screens. Yo what Tupac say? I aint one to push but if pushed, watch how far I go.”

I had the wonderful opportunity to hear you read from your story collection, An Agent of Utopia. I was drawn to the vivid sense of place and setting in your work, especially how richly you convey areas such as Florida and the American South. From a craft standpoint, how do you envision setting? How do you find the sense of place in a story, and how do you know which setting is right for a piece?

Before I start, I’d like to dedicate this Q&A to my late friend and mentor Michael Bishop (1945-2023), a brilliant writer in multiple genres who was far more eloquent on all these topics than I am. And now, after a moment of silence, onward we go.

Setting isn’t just backdrop. It pervades, informs—no, better, infuses—every other aspect of the story. This is most obvious in certain genres, for example ghost stories, sea stories, adventures of survival or exploration, locked-room mysteries, historical fiction, and all those suspense thrillers that depend on isolation: Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None is an exemplar of that form. But it’s true across the board. Setting is story.

Many of my story ideas are place-dependent from the outset. My Thomas More story An Agent of Utopia, for example, had to be set in London, specifically in the tower, and during the reign of Henry VIII—placed also in time. All this I simply knew, first thing. “The Devil’s Whatever” is almost a parody of that approach, a story determined entirely by the many interesting places I could find that invoked the Devil in their name.

But with “A Diorama of the Infernal Regions,” I knew that once Pearleen stepped through that ticky-tacky, dime-museum canvas, she could be anywhere—but where? I wrote the story’s opening right up to that point, then stopped for a long ponder. I knew only that it definitely would not be the Infernal Regions! It was a long time figuring out that she would emerge in the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose—a place I had visited, which is always an advantage.

When you find the right setting, you know immediately. It’s like solving a word puzzle. You finally think of that obvious word that had been eluding you all along. “Duh!” you say aloud, as you write it in. It had not been at all obvious, before, but it became so, the instant you thought of it. I guess any piece of fiction is a word puzzle, in a sense.       

An Agent of Utopia is a thrilling short story collection—at once wonderfully bizarre, piercingly humorous, and infused with historical weight. I love how seamlessly your writing weaves historical details with fabulism and speculative elements; what is your process like for approaching this intersection? What role do you think history plays in science/speculative fiction?

The late Philip Klass, who wrote as William Tenn, argued that history was the only science that science fiction ever really had—certainly the only complex human field of study that science fiction was ever really about. He pointed to future history and alternate history and parallel timelines; to all those time travelers in both directions; to all those extrapolations of the California Gold Rush into the asteroid belt, or of the Roman Empire onto the Galactic Empire; to all those pirates and generals and revolutionaries in space. He always reminded us of Gene Roddenberry’s successful pitch to TV executives who had been minting coin off Westerns for a decade: Star Trek would be “Wagon Train to the stars!”

Tenn’s is one of those lovely assertions, rife in our field and perhaps in every field, that seems to explain everything, until it doesn’t. It explains a lot, though—at least to a history buff like me!

More usefully, perhaps, anyone with even a glancing interest in history knows how partial it is, how incomplete, how biased, and how it keeps changing thanks to fresh ideas, new outlooks, and current research—just like physics, geography, economics, everything. Look at all we’ve learned in my lifetime about, say, Stonehenge, or the pre-colonial Native cities of the Americas.

Viewed in this light, any attempt to re-create the past has to involve fabulism and speculation—so it seems perfectly natural that at some point, you cross a fuzzy border and realize, what the heck, you’re writing spec-fic, so just roll with it. I would argue that it still should be truthful; but I assert that, William Tenn-like, about all fiction.

You are a graduate of the Clarion West Writers’ Workshop, and you’ve since returned to Clarion West and to Clarion at the University of California San Diego as an instructor. What role did attending Clarion West have on your growth as a writer? On the other end of this trajectory, how has the experience of returning as an instructor shaped your writing or your creative aesthetics?

A complete answer to the first question would entail everything I’ve done and thought and written and been since summer 1994, but the terse version is simply that I returned from that six-week residency in Seattle knowing that I was a writer and committed to living a writer’s life.

This seems odd to say, as I had been writing for newspapers for more than ten years at that point—but identifying as a reporter, even as a journalist, was a much narrower aperture for me than identifying as a writer. Suddenly I saw the world in widescreen and in color.

Clarion West was the making of me. And my greatest career honors are my invitations back to Clarion West or to Clarion to meet the future of the field, and to help these people however I can, including the paramount service of getting out of their way so that they can become more fully themselves.

I realize the Clarions are not for everyone—can never be, for countless practical reasons—and many other routes exist to finding oneself as a writer. I laud all of them. Whatever works, I say. But the Clarions helped me, and so I try to help them in return.

I really admire your expansive involvement in the science fiction and fantasy (SFF) community. From your participation in Clarion to your numerous publications and interviews, you’ve been an integral part of the community for years. Though the literary industry is ever evolving, what advice do you have for emerging writers as they seek to build their literary careers?

Imitate everyone; it’s a necessary part of every writer’s development, and every writer’s toolbox. Moreover, if you imitate a variety of things simultaneously, you’ll seem not imitative, but original.

The ultimate goal, however, is not to fit anyone else’s genre(s), but to become your own genre, a genre of one. The highest public compliment I ever received was in an unlikely place, an online comment thread debating whether one of my award-nominated stories fit this genre or that genre ad infinitum, and Gardner Dozois shut it down by saying: “I’ll tell you what kind of story this is. It’s an Andy Duncan story.” 

Keep reading everything, especially the work of newcomers—and when you like their work, please tell everyone, beginning with the newcomers themselves. They need the boost.  

Get involved. In addition to writing, try lots of writing-adjacent things—editing, publishing, reviewing, interviewing, organizing, publicizing, lobbying, running for writerly or artistic office, fundraising; even, bless your heart, teaching—to see which ones you enjoy and are good at and can keep doing, alongside the writing. Because your fellow writers sure can use your help, and as you help us, you’re also deepening your own experience as a writer.

Also, practice saying, whenever needed, “No, thanks, but I appreciate your thinking of me,” so that you can return to what you want to do.

Finally, I pass along Stephen King’s advice: “Put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.”

You’ve been a member of the English faculty at Frostburg State University since 2008. How has working in academia shaped your writing? Additionally, is there anything you hope to see evolving or shifting in the academic sphere with respect to creative writing?

I’m a bit unusual, I think, in that my academic career and my fiction-writing career began simultaneously. When I left my newspaper job for graduate school in summer 1993—which enabled my summer 1994 Clarion West experience in the first place—I told the truth to everyone who asked: “I want to see whether I like teaching, and whether I like writing.” I thought I’d give them a try, and if they didn’t work out, I’d go back to journalism. In fact, I reveled in both, and though I would return to stints of journalism after graduation, it was always as a clear interruption (however pleasant or practical) to what I now viewed as my true path, a twinned path: I write; I teach. To me, the one shapes the other, an ongoing exchange.

Needless to add, this is not a universal experience! Plenty of teachers, even of writing, don’t write; plenty of writers, don’t teach. But to me, they seem inseparable. (I should reaffirm here what I said earlier: There are many routes. Higher ed is only one, but it was mine.)

I would love to see creative writing as a recognized, honorable, necessary component of every discipline taught on campus, which is part of my larger desire to see the arts and humanities reaffirmed as the core of a university education, and not as a gang of unwashed buskers barely tolerated so long as their sidewalk squat is kept outside the corporate gates. No problem facing the world is solely a STEM problem, and no past, present, or future student is solely a STEM product. We have to learn everything, if we are to know anything. Thanks for asking!

Recently, you released a webpage called “Weird Western Maryland,” an ongoing culmination of what you call “many years of happily random research.” These tales are so impressively sourced from a wide range of locations, materials, and historical moments. Can you talk about the process for collecting these legends, beliefs, and stories? What role did creating this project play in your own creativity or storytelling impulse?

To say that I have a “process” for collecting this stuff would make it sound a lot more logical than it really is. (The same is true for my fiction-writing “process,” I’m afraid.) Certainly, I collect and read books and articles on all these topics, and my happiest mailbox moments are when Fortean Times arrives from London. I perk up whenever anyone in conversation mentions some weirdness in their family or neighborhood or hometown. I’ve taken a number of classes via the Rhine Research Center in North Carolina. And I am a compulsive list-maker, note-taker, file-creator, document-filer and (digital) cloud-seeder; I will never run out of material, but I am always hungry for more.

After years of witnessing all these OCD behaviors, my wife, Sydney, had a brilliant suggestion as sabbatical time rolled around: “Why don’t you write up for your sabbatical the weird stuff you’ve been collecting about Western Maryland ever since we moved here?” That jump-started not only the sabbatical but the public outreach finally bearing fruit at Andy Duncan’s “Weird Western Maryland.” That it’s housed on a university website is weird in itself!

What is something you are currently reading, watching, or writing that you’re excited about?

I agree with my friend Amy Branam Armiento, immediate past president of the Poe Studies Association, that Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher on Netflix is not only terrific but the best Poe adaptation ever. There, I said it, and with scholarly backup! But I love The Great British Baking Show, too.

*SPOILER ALERT* This review contains plot details of In the Shadow of the Fall.

It will be published on July 23, 2024 by Tordotcom.

Tobi Ogundiran’s In the Shadow of the Fall delivers a compact yet powerful exploration of self-discovery in a magical, African-inspired world. Despite its brevity as a novella, Ogundiran’s debut excels with vivid character development and absorbing worldbuilding, offering readers a fresh twist on genre expectations of Eurocentric fantasy. The story traverses culture and identity through the eyes of Ashâke, an upstart, failed acolyte who brashly attempts to summon the orisha, gods of the West-African Yoruba religion, for her own purposes. This sets off a chain of events that plunges her into a sprawling journey to uncover the truth about the world and her place within it. Comparable to N. K. Jemisin, Ogundiran’s voice is gritty, but the narrative retains a gripping mystique. It strikes an intriguing balance between the contemporary surge in low-fantasy titles and classic tales of epic gods and mythologies, making for a fresh change of pace.

The standout gem of In the Shadow of the Fall is its African worldbuilding, which serves as the vibrant tapestry against which Ashâke’s personal narrative unfolds. Ogundiran weaves elements of folklore, mythology, and African culture to create a setting that feels authentic and enchanting. The textual communication of oral tradition in the story is an admirable feat as Ashâke learns of her heritage through song. This a transformative, spiritual experience that readers are easily able to pick up as they read along. “Jaha stepped into the circle, spread his ample arms wide, and bellowed to the heavens…The world fell away. The griots, the trees, the fire…then the world burst to colour before [Ashâke].” We are buoyed by Ogundiran’s expertise as he plunges us into a new world of vital and tantalizing images.

In the Shadow of the Fall’s magic-brimming world is paired with impactful prose, highlighted particularly during action scenes. Whether it’s a pulse-pounding chase through the forest or a retelling of a creation myth, Ogundiran renders plot beats with cinematic flair. “Several bolts of lightning fractured the heavens, terribly in their beauty…A bolt forked through the Tower. The top half shifted, teetered on its edge, then with a great groan, shattered.” His writing is bold and evocative, painting striking images that linger in the mind. In these moments, Ogundiran’s talent as a storyteller is on full display, immersing readers’ senses and leaving them hungry for more.

Through the eyes of young Ashâke, readers are introduced to a diverse cast of personalities: the eccentric Ba Fatai, the high priestess Iyalawo, and chief Mama Agba, who guide Ashâke on her journey of self-discovery. These characters are vivid and visual, springing to life in just a few sentences. Due to the succinctness a novella’s word count demands, they can at times feel tropey, although, perhaps only because Western literature has already made caricatures of these types of characters. Ogundiran’s work arguably humanizes these tropes by contextualizing them within their own culture and giving them their own motives. We know Ba Fatai and Mama Agba are meet-the-mentor and fairy-godmother-type characters. Leaning into these assumptions while giving the characters a striking visual identity orients us quickly and seeds our expectations for the role they will play. Ogundiran then promptly spring boards us into more nuanced, informed character expression—a territory into which I was more than happy to be flung. My only gripe is that I desperately wanted to know more about these characters.

There are moments where In the Shadow of the Fall’s feels constrained by the same economy of language that sets it apart. Take the description of the griot encampment Ashâke encounters after escaping the temple for example: “Eight huge boats idled in the river. Each vessel was onion-shaped, their hulls covered with brightly painted whorl patterns…It looked like a floating city.” I read this and want to know, has Ashâke heard of griots before? What kinds of whorls are painted, and what might they represent? Who fashions the griots, and from which resources? It’s important to consider that I don’t see these answers because I am unfamiliar with African history. I read the word “whorl,” and think it’s describing a shape: a swirl. It may be a culturally significant symbol, like my own koru—an indigenous swirling pattern used in New Zealand Māori art—and I am only scratching the surface of its meaning.  With a higher word count to play with, Ogundiran may have built on these frameworks and further showcased his potential for introducing an underrepresented culture to a broad audience.

The novella could also have benefitted from more socio-political intrigue. The psyops of belief is pivotal to the story’s gods, the orisha, and to Ashâke’s self-discovery. Who holds the power to control information for the masses is an important question that was not wholeheartedly answered by the book’s end. While Ashâke is sheltered and primarily concerned with her identity, this naivete could have been used as a blank slate from which to launch her—and the readers—into the subversive realm of the book’s politics and religion, giving us a broader view of the forces at play when magic meets man’s lust for power.

Qualms aside, In the Shadow of the Fall is a refreshing debut, and a testament to Tobi Ogundiran’s talent as an emerging writer. He blends intricate worldbuilding with compelling, character-driven storytelling to create a debut that is pithy, culturally crucial, and filled with mystical allure. While the novella may leave readers yearning for a deeper exploration of its world, its strengths lie in the same place—a richly imagined setting, nuanced characters, and vibrant prose. Fans of fantasy and adventure will find much to love in this captivating tale of old gods, found family, and identity.

As F(r)iction invites you explore the invisible realms of our latest release, The Unseen Issue, we’ve compiled five best-selling novels to whet your appetite for the unknown. These stories, told by hidden narrators, challenge traditional storytelling conventions to shed new light on visibility, identity, and reality. Slap these on your reading list for 2024 with F(r)iction: Unseen as your companion—packed full of emerging talent and diverse voices—and strap in for a deep dive into the dark.

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

In this genre-bending epistolary novella, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone weave a patchwork narrative that unfolds through a series of hidden letters exchanged between two rival agents—Red and Blue—across divergent timelines in a galactic war. The narrators, never explicitly revealed, are the voices of these agents as they lace a complex tapestry of love, espionage, and temporal manipulation in their letters to one another across time. As readers navigate the cross-dimensional landscape of the novella, the boundaries between protagonist and storyteller blur, submerging readers in a dual experience of action and retrospection.

The shapeshifting ability of the narrators allows El-Mohtar and Gladstone to build a referential work, with many of the covert identities Red and Blue assume resembling existing historical figures on Earth, or renowned icons of sci-fi literature. Here, science fiction hums as a living undercurrent, freeing the authors to zoom in on the rivals-to-lovers epic between Red and Blue in its star-crossed glory. This genre tension is perfectly captured by the quote, “I would rather break the world than lose you.”

Circe by Madeline Miller

Madeline Miller breathes life into the mythological figure of Circe, enchantress of Aeaea, in this first-person narrative rippling with power and vulnerability. While the narrator is ostensibly Circe herself, her omniscience and agency are realized through Miller’s clever utilization of point of view: Circe is unarguably the reliable narrator of her own experience. Miller gives an authentic voice to one of many hitherto silent female figures in Greek myth, sweeping readers into a transformative inner-journey across the vast mythology so many of us know and love in the classics. As Circe recounts her journey from divine exile to powerful sorceress, Miller imbues the narrative with her rich knowledge in Greco-Roman literature, filling in the gaps where spotlight characters like Odysseus and Heracles historically took front and center. Circe is a deeply informed work, reimagining the classics with masterful finesse. Miller leaves us with the feeling that Circe’s story was always there. She wrote until she set it free. 

Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

Tamsyn Muir crafts a labyrinthine tale of necromantic intrigue with the second installment in The Locked Tomb series, AKA: lesbian necromancers in space. A stark detour from its prequel, Harrow the Ninth flirts with reality and illusion as the protagonist, Harrowhark Nonagesimus, struggles to piece her identity back together following the dizzying events in Gideon the Ninth. As Harrowhark navigates her new role as Lyctor to God of the Nine Houses (a role she cannot remember being assigned), the story’s narrator remains bafflingly elusive. Muir leaves us to oscillate between Harrow’s internal monologue, her fractured—and blatantly incorrect—memories of the events in Gideon, and what appears to be her experience of hallucinatory psychosis. We cannot be sure, nor are we supposed to be. This complex narration adds an unsettling obfuscation to the story, challenging us to discern truth in a universe where death holds no dominion and Harrow herself must grapple with the unreliable narrator of her own mind.

The Invisible Life of Addie La Rue by V.E. Schwab

V.E. Schwab tells a haunting tale of immortality and longing in her 2020 fantasy release. The titular character, Adeline, grapples with the consequences of a Faustian bargain she made to escape an unwanted marriage in the 17th century, traversing the centuries as a deathless wanderer, until the year 2014 where she meets a man who carries a similar curse. Addie’s narrative unfolds like a confession revealing the loneliness of her immortal existence and the cold solace she comes to find in her only friend, the very demon with whom she forged a pact. While Addie stumbles through time, her future self is subtly present to guide the reader across the trajectory of her journey, allowing for flashes of insight that Addie herself doesn’t yet have. Schwab’s refined storytelling gives us a profound insight into identity and mortality, as Addie embarks on her eternal quest for connection.

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

Ishiguro explores the intersection of artificial intelligence and human fallibility in his dystopian sci-fi, hitting closer to home every year since its release in 2021. Through the eyes of Klara, an AI companion designed to bring solace to the lonely child Josie, Ishiguro challenges us to consider whether empathy is learned or innate, engineered or universal. Ishiguro imbues Klara with a sense of childlike wonder and existential curiosity. Yet her endearingly short-sighted conclusions about the world—such as her mistaking the sun for a god as a solar-powered android—point to a deeper exploration of sentience. Klara does not understand where the sun sets, or what it means to go to sleep or die, but somehow, she understands more profoundly than the human characters in the story, the struggle to save a loved one from suffering. Klara vandalizes public property as a plea to the sun to free Josie of an incurable sickness. This heart-wrenching story confronts us with what it means to be conscious, and what shape kindness takes in an age of technological advancement.

Hidden narrators beckon us into a liminal space where voice and identity can shift, and new perspectives can be gleaned. These five novels sit on the bleeding edge of genre innovation, calling on us to broaden our horizons and push our awareness. F(r)iction calls on you to delve deeper with our Unseen Issue. From spectral illusions to elusive truths, Unseen is packed with genre-staples as well as newer, weirder, and wilder tales. Grab a copy from our store today or subscribe to our tri-annual publication for your very own dose of the unknown. 

It’s happened again. You picked up a new book or started a show, and your spidey-sense began tingling. There’s something about this character. Something unique, compelling—relatable, even. There’s an element of their personality that reminds you of you. You have a hunch, a building suspicion, so you google the character, read interviews from their creator,…

You’ve heard it before—that sage, age-old writerly wisdom, supposedly enough to crack the code to creating vibrant, truthful, and resonant works of literature: “Write what you know.” Sounds simple enough, but what is it exactly that we’re supposed to know again? Surely not every story should be restrained by the quotidian characters and scenarios of real life; surely not every self-indulgent Mary Sue should make its way into a final piece. But the goal is not to turn fantasy into realism, or fiction into memoir—rather, it is to enhance your writing with the verisimilitude of life, whatever genre it may be. What the teachers, authors, and workshoppers bestowing this classic advice fail to explain is how to actually know what it is that you know.

Here are some concrete writing tips and exercises to help you truly “write what you know,” gathered over my time as a F(r)iction intern and a Literary Editing and Publishing student at USC.

1. Observe from Life

Just like visual artists practice live figure drawing, sketch out the characters in your life by taking notes on their conversations, mannerisms, and idiosyncrasies. You can even people-watch and eavesdrop on strangers’ conversations in public. These details can easily become part of a fictional character, a scene, or dialogue, but even more importantly, you’ll get in the habit of observation. The more you view life like a writer, the richer and more lifelike your work becomes.

2. Journal, Journal, Journal

This advice is nothing new; but how do your whiny diary entries help you when you want to write Good Serious Fiction, you might ask? To continue the artist analogy, treat your diary or journal like an artist’s sketchbook. Your diary isn’t merely a confessional experience, it is also a practice space, full of authentic introspection and observations about life that can be drawn out into a more formal piece of writing. You never know what snippets may fit perfectly in a piece or inspire an entirely new story.

3. Practice Self-Indulgence

Many writers share a fear that writing too close to your personal experience will come across as self-indulgent, flimsy, arrogant, cringe, righteous, boring, or any number of negative associations. It’s scary to reveal ourselves or our loved ones—and women writers especially face the dreaded accusation of the “Mary Sue,” as if a “self-insert” character is the most cardinal crime a genre writer can commit. Well, I say write it anyway. Write the cringey, self-insert fanfiction—you’ll still be practicing the essentials, like style, plot, voice, dialogue, theme, atmosphere . . . the list goes on! Write dumb things until you no longer believe that self-indulgence equals dumb.

4. Follow the Shadow Self

To get inspired, ask yourself one simple question: W.W.E.M.D.? What Would Evil Me Do? Take a scenario from your recent life and reimagine it: If the worst possible version of yourself took over and made all your decisions in that moment, what would have happened? Play out the most outlandish scenarios, discover new plot possibilities, and indulge in your shadow self to create exciting characters. By drawing from a real moment in your life, where you could have made a different decision, and following that shadowy voice that tempts you to take the low road, even the wackiest conclusions will be grounded in realism.

5. Embrace Autofiction

Writing from real life doesn’t have to be boring. Whether you’re writing fantasy, sci-fi, horror, or realistic fiction, literature can explore questions of the self regardless of genre. Autofiction, or stories that fictionalize elements of the author’s life and leave the truth intentionally ambiguous, proliferates the current literary fiction scene. Many authors are already out there blurring the lines between author and narrator, between the self and its representation, between fiction and reality; this is exciting new territory and it’s reshaping how we view the fictional novel. Don’t be afraid to write as yourself—or some skewed, semi-fictional version of yourself. Audiences are eating up the ambiguity.

As a writer, you are your own greatest asset. Anyone can learn how to string some pretty words together, but the most valuable thing your work has to offer is that it came from you. It is uniquely yours—a cocktail of your worldview, psychology, passions, interests, observations, past experiences, hyperfixations, and the characters that fill your life, shaken not stirred—and that is not a recipe anyone else can recreate. The first step to writing what you know is killing the critic inside your head that cringes away from anything that feels “too you.” Spoiler alert: you’ll never succeed at becoming not-you, so you might as well embrace what you got. I promise it’ll make your writing even better.

In I Love You More: A Reluctant Memoir, you mention your mother wanted you to write this story, and you usually do as your mother wants. In addition to this motivation, what else led you to write this book?

I wanted to address some deeper confusions I had about my childhood. I wanted to research and understand the truth because I wasn’t confident in the stories I’d been told my whole life. Searching for the truth led to writing, and writing led to the truth. After that happened, and with my mom’s encouragement, the story took on a life of its own.

Projects will do that! I’d like to talk about your choices regarding content. This story spans many years and many miles, beginning in the Appalachians and tracing back family lines. Was this one of the ways I Love You More took on a life of its own? What was it like as a writer to decide which places, people, and events to include in such an expansive project?

Choosing the places to write about was easy because each place is a character in the story, in its own right; they each hold a place factually, thematically, and emotionally. While that wasn’t an issue, how much life to give these places was difficult. I would have given them much more, but I already had 400 pages of content. I love to write about places. Describing them is fun for me; evocative nature writing is what I aspire to, quite frankly.

In terms of events, let me address my choices in terms of structure. This was tricky for me; I struggled with how to best present everything. Eventually, I realized chronologically was the best way… it’s an easy choice for readers to follow. However, I bookended this story with the present day as the frame, in which I meet with my father and present him with my questions. It took a while for me to come to that decision. What I came to realize is it was better for both myself, and the story to let the reader know from the very first chapter that this awful thing happened. I didn’t want to be coy about it because there was already enough to tease out and develop.

Another aspect of this decision that ties into character choices was my inclusion of Trudeau, the cop. Trudeau is a major character. I struggled with this choice until it became clear to me that you can’t include a cop until you have a crime, but the crime doesn’t happen until halfway through the book. So, I had to put it in context by disclosing that I only know about many details of the crime because Trudeau gave me the information. I realized that by just telling the readers what I know up front, and why, it gives me credibility. That was a choice related to structure that was harder, but in the end, I was very happy with it. The reader came along with me on my journey.

In a different interview, you mentioned the only structure you could tell this story through was as a memoir through your eyes. Can you speak about how you came to that decision?

I came to that decision through painful and excruciating trial and error! When you take writing classes, the teachers will tell you to explore different writing styles, and even copy them, much like a painter may copy the Mona Lisa as an exercise. They’ll say, “Well, pull up Tennessee Williams and try something that he did. Try it on.” So as exercises, I “tried on” various styles and literary devices to see how they felt. Writing can be very tedious work, so why not have fun and go off on a tangent every now and then? It’s like candy! My advice to writers is to just let yourself go and don’t take yourself too seriously; see what sparks from experimenting.

While working on I Love You More, I tried writing this memoir in third person and second person, but neither of these perspectives made sense; it wasn’t accomplishing the purpose of this project, which was to get my feelings out. So, I think it was inevitable that this story be written in first person.

Did the writing process of I Love You More differ from your other writing ventures?

Yes. Before I decided to write I Love You More, I had a job which required me to write pieces that were more technical and not conducive to telling a story. I had to learn not only how to write a story, but how to structure a story. I’m not saying you need a PhD, but you need to know some principles. I realized I had a big hole in my writing education, so I went to fill it at workshops with Lighthouse Writers, who do a great job. They made me become a better reader, and it certainly helped my writing. I would encourage anyone in a similar situation to get help; Lighthouse gave me vital feedback and helped me get on track when I was flailing about.

Another important note about my process for writing I Love You More is that even though I did all this learning on how to write story, I wasn’t being deeply honest with myself. At first, I didn’t know that was the case. I wasn’t consciously trying to hide anything; I just didn’t realize that I needed to delve deeper. Erika Krouse, a mentor I met through Lighthouse, was so generous with her time in helping me with I Love You More. She was very gentle about it, but she made me realize that I wasn’t addressing the big questions raised by the book. This forced me to address those questions, and in doing so, I became honest with myself. I highly recommend her book, Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation, in which she bared her soul, which gave me the courage to be brutally honest and totally vulnerable in my own writing.

Aside from writing, you’re also an artist, working primarily with glass. I’m curious about the creative process of fusing glass, and how it’s similar and different to working with words.

The beginning of both art forms starts with a glimmer. When I see light through colored glass, it just makes me happy. It’s beautiful to witness the incredible colors of colored glass come to life when lit up. That moment is what I call a glimmer. Writing, especially nature writing, needs to start with a glimmer: a moment you have all by yourself where you witness something beautiful—or even something awful—that moves you. That glimmer compels you to take the next step, which is to preserve it, getting it down and recreating it.

The actual work of glass fusing is very painstaking. There’s a lot of trial and error, at least when I was just starting out. That fits my personality: I’m an organized, picky person with a strong work ethic. My mother taught me to finish what you start, and that helped with putting together the different pieces of my book, finishing it, and publishing it. Like we discussed earlier, I Love You More took on a life of its own. But once it got that life, I couldn’t let it go! I had to finish it. Even when I realized it needed improving, I never gave up; with writing, you have to tell yourself if it’s not perfect, the next draft will be better, but you have to keep going! As an author, that picky side of myself is always looking for areas to improve or wishing I wrote x instead of y. It’s important not to quit what you start, but once your work is finished and out in the world, it’s not your work anymore. You have to let it go. It’s the same with glass.

What’s the most important thing you learned through the publishing process?

It’s important to clarify your goals with selling and marketing your project. With I Love You More, I decided I would not do the needle-in-the-haystack approach where I hope and hope against all hope that somebody would notice me and I’d get an agent. I decided to go with a hybrid publisher, meaning they’re not one of the big publishing houses; there’s more independence on the author’s end, but they help you with the process.

That meant I wasn’t going to end up in Barnes and Noble or have a hardcover version of I Love You More because it goes through a different system. But I didn’t care about that; I just wanted to tell my story. The amount of control I had during the publishing process was critical to me, I designed the cover myself, using a beautiful Alaskan photograph by David Parkhurst, and the book is available on both Amazon and e-readers; these are the things that really mattered to me.

Your author bio mentions another project that you’re currently working on called Light Through Colored Glass. Can you speak about this project and how working on it has differed from writing a generational memoir?

Light Through Colored Glass is a collection of short stories I’m working on. I want to finish some of the stories I tried to tell in I Love You More but was not able to for various reasons. I also have a growing list of other ideas. I’m planning to go to Juneau for a week in May to focus on this collection. I’m making an appointment with myself to work!

Lastly, I’d like to circle back around to I Love You More. There’s a line at the end that says, “My brave mother chose happiness over despair, so that is her destiny. If I can muster the strength to choose love over anger, grace will be mine.” Did writing this book help you choose love?

Absolutely. Mother Theresa said, “If we really want to love, we must learn how to forgive”; Gandhi said, “The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is an attribute of the strong”; and Paul Boese said, “Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future.” Although I had to absorb these basic principles on my own, all the research and writing helped me in my journey toward forgiveness. At the end of the day, what I do know is that it was critical for me to forgive in order to move on and experience the love, and the life, I wanted.

What was the inspiration behind writing The Insomniacs?

In high school, my best friend was (and still is) an insomniac. At some point, I realized she had a whole other life that took place at night. She had two social lives during high school while most of us have only one! Years and years later, I loved this idea for a story—the chance to have a double life but also tell the story of a friendship/romantic relationship that takes place strictly in the night.

In The Insomniacs, you include a level of mystery. Why is this aspect important for your style of storytelling? What challenges did you face while writing The Insomniacs when trying to incorporate this element?

I love writing stories with multiple layers and slowly revealing them. The set-up of the book was inspired by the Hitchcock film, Rear Window, although it was challenging because this book is a mystery, not a thriller. Instead of a dead body, the mystery revolves around betrayal. The book is in many ways, a psychological mystery, and that internal journey was extremely challenging to write! It incorporates the element of “Did I actually see that or was it all a dream?” and “Can I trust my own eyes when I’m exhausted and recovering from an injury?”

The novel touches upon familial issues with Ingrid’s absentee father and a mother who is almost always working. How does this play a role in Ingrid’s guilt and PTSD?

Ingrid, like many kids, is protective of her parent. She is powerless when her dad leaves, and watches how it impacts her mom financially and emotionally. As a result, Ingrid takes on more emotional responsibility and worry than she should—in doing so she’s sent messages of strength and independence that are easily misconstrued as “I don’t have any problems.” Both Ingrid and Van internalize much of their grief about their parents as their fault, becoming central figures in the stories they tell themselves about their parents and what happened to them.

When writing how do you decide which plot point to focus on? How do you bring your initial story idea into fruition? What plot point did you most want to focus on with “The Insomniacs?”

This book had pretty intricate plotting. I like to think of the different plot threads as spinning plates that need to be balanced, not dropped! If I’ve left one alone for too long, it was time to bring it back in. I mostly wanted to focus on Van and Ingrid’s love story! Those scenes of reconnection, flirtation, and misunderstanding were so fun to write.

Throughout the story, we also see Van and Ingrid’s romantic relationship develop as the story progresses. What was most important to develop this relationship? What role do you think romance plays in The Insomniacs and other YA novels?

I aimed to establish the slow burn in the story, highlighting the contrast between Ingrid and Van’s perceived social differences. Building trust between them, as well as rekindling their childhood bond was very important. I appreciate how an old friendship can transcend time and circumstances. To me, romance in YA novels represents hope and a new experience knocking on your door. Suddenly the day-to-day changes and ends up demonstrating how life can take on new dimensions overnight.

The Insomniacs has been described as a coming-of-age story. What elements do you think are important to you when writing such a story?

My characters grapple with flaws they see as permanent, terrible parts of themselves. They undergo a journey of self-forgiveness and realization that their flaws don’t define them as bad people. Easier said than done! Through their experiences, they gain awareness that they’re not alone, that we’re all flawed, including the adults in their lives. Almost all of my characters realize they need to listen to their own instincts over the opinions of those they love most in the world. They move forward, making decisions more aligned with their true selves.

It’s mentioned on your website that you enjoy writing YA. What is it about YA that draws you towards the genre?

I love writing YA because I remember that time in my life so vividly! Everything seems brand new because you haven’t made any permanent decisions that will take you down a set path. The world appears open. Not all of my books have this, but my favorite trope is friends to lovers. Also, a touch of Romeo and Juliet because I love when people cross perceived social barriers to be together.

How would you describe the publishing process? What was most difficult and what made it easier for you? What advice would you give to aspiring authors?

I thought it would be smooth(er) sailing once I signed with an agent. But then you need editors/publishers to say yes, then you need readers to say yes. My advice would be to remember that the process is SO subjective. One reader will love your main character and another will say, “your main character didn’t resonate.” My author friend and I say, over and over again, “It only takes one.” It only takes one agent to say, “I love it!” Also, you can’t just tell yourself to have a thick skin, but you definitely develop one over time. My best advice is to finish whatever you are working on. Just finish it!! So many writers never finish their project whether it’s a book, a screenplay, a play, etc. You are way ahead of the game if you complete something (even if it’s a terrible first draft!). Just keep going, even if you’re feeling unsure.

Flash: The Return of Barry Allen storyline just celebrated a twenty-year anniversary in 2023. Decades later, it still stands out to me as a story of Wally West dealing with/overcoming imposter syndrome, where, though someone might be high functioning in their role, external circumstances could cause them to still feel phony and doubt themselves or their abilities. Where was Wally at in his life when you took over writing this storyline in the nineties? 

As a fictional character, he was actually in a good place; my predecessor, Bill Loebs, is an excellent writer who brilliantly communicates his humanism through his work. As a comics series, not so much. It wasn’t not selling, but sales were sliding in the wake of the year-long bump the recently canceled CBS-TV show had given it. At a Christmas party, right after I’d taken the book over, a drunk DC executive said to me, “I don’t even know why we’re bothering to publish that book now,” which if anything only made me double down on my efforts. 

To give our readers some context, can you talk about Barry Allen, the previous Flash, saving the entire DC Universe during the original maxi series? And how his sacrifice was considered untouchable, as far as bringing Barry back, in an industry where characters are regularly resurrected? 

In short, as much as that can be: While there had been one or two parallel-world stories in DC comics before Barry Allen was introduced, in DC continuity he was the first superhero to discover the concept of alternate Earths, and a lot of his stories revolved around the concept. But by 1986, DC was interested in streamlining its continuity by eliminating the multiverse—hence, the Crisis on Infinite Earths series—and from a meta standpoint, just as Barry had been the one to open the multiversal door, he was killed off in the story that closed it. And it was, by all standards, a well-done and moving death with a solid sense of finality about it. (This was before the trend of killing-and-reviving characters was so common that comics Heaven installed a revolving door.) On top of all of that, through managerial errors less than the writer’s doing, the Flash series had been duller than dishwater for nearly a decade prior, and Barry was always portrayed as a good guy with all the depth of a bottle cap. So, his sacrifice was probably the best Flash story told in years and years. Consequently, there was real resistance to ever resurrecting him. So great was his sacrifice, he became DC’s first unofficial saint. And on top of that, his nephew and former sidekick, Wally West, took up the mantle in his honor, and that worked out so well no one wanted to take that away from Wally for the longest time. 

Your first, ongoing Wally West story in The Flash series, dealt with him as Kid Flash and gave readers a look into his safe space of visiting his Aunt Iris (Barry’s girlfriend and future wife). How did this time with Iris and Barry impact Wally’s time away from his home life? How would Wally’s relationship with his Uncle Barry, not just Barry as The Flash, create a situation where he would find replacing Barry unimaginable? 

You know what? I’ve never once thought about that. Nearly every time we ever saw the two of them together, they were superheroing, so I never really imagined they had a strong familial relationship out of costume! 

The very first issue of The Return of Barry Allen, Wally talks about his inner conflict of wanting to honor Barry’s memory by being The Flash but feeling he is not up to the task. At the time in comics, how groundbreaking was it that Wally was the first ever sidekick to take over the mantle of their mentor? 

Hugely. That had never been done before, and it made Wally unique in the superhero pantheon. It’s been done plenty since, but Wally was the first to take over the identity of his mentor. 

The Return of Barry Allen also deals with the physical manifestation of Wally’s imposter syndrome, namely that he can only run at the speed of sound following Barry’s death. Can you talk about how the Flash family gets Wally to address the issue and how it ties into his fear of surpassing Barry when running at his top speed? 

Wally’s limitations—chief among them, that he wasn’t nearly as fast as his uncle ever was—were certainly mentally imposed. That disparity in speed wasn’t there when Wally was Kid Flash. And even though Wally knew that intellectually, he couldn’t break through that barrier emotionally, where it counted, until Barry’s reputation was in danger of being permanently blackened.

There was a surprise outcome from this storyline. I don’t wish to talk about the ending for fear of spoiling the story, but can we discuss how The Flash comic became a beacon to guide the industry out of its “grim and gritty” era? Would you like to talk about the heroic age that followed this time of darker superhero stories and Wally’s part in connecting the whole DC Universe together? 

Editor Brian Augustyn and I shared a deep admiration for what were in the 1990s considered “old school” comics—comics where heroes saved the day because they were clever and had heart rather than because they could punch villains really hard. And I cannot overstate how absent that storytelling approach was from the comics medium in that era. It was a time of dark, cynical storylines and events, and neither Brian nor I had any use for cynicism. To us, cynicism was utterly antithetical to the very concept of superheroes, who were adolescent power fantasies created to do impossible things. Consequently, Brian and I and our book were looked upon as a throwback to the Silver Age of comics, and it took readers a l-o-n-g time to realize that, no, we weren’t trying to replicate the comics of our youth; we were trying to take the best parts of them and fold them into modern stories with modern storytelling. And we can thank writer Grant Morrison as much as anyone for pushing that idea. His open acknowledgement of how what we were doing was direct inspiration for his own DC superhero work was just the endorsement we needed. Slowly, we began to push the overall tide back towards a sense of optimism.  

When you later returned to writing The Flash comic in the aughts, you showed Wally as both a superhero and family man with two kids. Can you talk about how being a father to Iris and Jai West shows Wally moving beyond the broken home that drew him to run in the footsteps of Barry and how he now walks his own path as The Flash? 

Giving him children wasn’t my choice and was probably not a choice I’d have made, but my job when taking on a series is to play the cards I’m dealt, so I made an effort to, in fact, contrast his own painful upbringing with the happy home he gave his wife and kids. 

Was there ever a time that you dealt with imposter syndrome as you started writing comics and began working on characters that were iconic from your childhood? 

Christ, what time is it now? I still feel it. Find me any writer who doesn’t deal with imposter syndrome, and I’ll show you an overconfident hack whose work isn’t nearly as good as they think it is. Honestly, I consider imposter syndrome part of the writing equation, as a hell of a motivator to keep trying and keep inventing new techniques and new ideas. 

What was it like writing a teenage Wally Kid Flash? 

Fun! We sidestepped some of the ugliness of his life at that period, but honestly, the Wests weren’t monsters, and in my mind, it’s not like Wally suffered every day at their hands. The family simply flared with dysfunction frequently, and in that issue of WF: TT, we were lucky enough to be there on one of the good days. 

What are you working on now and where can our readers find you online? 

Currently, I’m working on DC’s Batman/Superman: World’s Finest and (issue two coming soon!), as well as their summer event series, Absolute Power. There are also a few other assignments in various states of completion that DC will be announcing soon. 

Online, I’m on Bluesky and Instagram (the latter as @waidmark), and because I’m old, also on Facebook. I don’t update markwaid.com as often as I ought to, but that’s also a part of my online presence. 

*SPOILER ALERT *This review contains plot details of You Glow in the Dark.

Published on February 06, 2024 by New Directions Publishing.

You Glow in the Dark is Liliana Colanzi’s breathtaking and haunting English debut. This collection of speculative short stories contemplates radioactive violence, environmental resiliency, and the ghostly inheritance of colonialism through the lenses of horror and cyberpunk fiction. With its heart situated in the Bolivian altiplano, Colanzi’s stories expand our political imagination through an interrogation of a history fraught with survival and revolution.

Although my knowledge of Bolivian history only extends to the research I did in relation to this collection, as a third-generation Latina, I’m aware of the specific and chilling ways the history of colonization lingers in Latin American communities. Stories like “The Greenest Eyes,” which explores a mestiza girl’s willingness to make a Faustian deal for eyes as green of those of her Italian father’s, felt all-too familiar, but may be read by other audiences as purely fantastical.

Similarly, when the narrator of “Chaco” is possessed by the ghost of a Mataco man he killed, I’m inclined to think of it less as a “ghost” story and more as historical fiction with paranormal elements. The region of Gran Chaco in Bolivia is marred with the forced expulsion of multiple indigenous groups, wars, and conservation issues because the land is rich in oil. The Mataco man’s words echoing in the narrator’s head reveal the truth that emerges when history is not told by the victors: “The river turned to poison, the fish turned belly up and died. Hunger was great, hunger was long, and food in short supply.” This incantation also serves as a warning for what could happen if a society continues to prioritize profit and resources over the land and the environment.

One possible future is imagined in one of my favorite stories in the collection, “Atomito.” This story follows numerous characters in an Andean cyberpunk society that revolves around a nuclear power plant ironically named after Túpac Katari, a revolutionary leader in colonial-era Bolivia. Looming in the background of the narrative is an impending radioactive disaster intertwined with a mysterious and fictional Andean deity, Atomito, who is linked to an actual Andean deity, Pachamama. The prose is flavored with Snow Crash-eque irreverancy, vocabulary from the Andes and Japanese diaspora in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, and the unique ways five young adults survive in this bizarre ecosystem. I was immediately hypnotized by Colanzi’s transcendent worldbuilding and felt connected to each character’s drive, desires, and fate. My only critique of this story is that I wish it was longer—I would be thrilled to read a novel as long as Snow Crash about this world and these characters.

Speaking of radioactive disasters, I can’t discuss You Glow in the Dark in good faith without discussing the final story in the collection, also titled “You Glow in the Dark.” This story is inspired by the unspeakably tragic 1987 Goiânia accident, wherein hundreds of individuals were exposed to highly radioactive caesium chloride. In such tragedies, it is easy to see statistics and forget the humanity of the individual lives lost. Colanzi rectifies this by creating compelling and unique stories for the otherwise voiceless: from the imagined perspectives of the families directly impacted to fictional accounts of the hundreds of thousands rushed to local hospitals to check exposure levels.

The story that haunts me the most is that of Devair Alves Ferreira, who, in both real life and the story, comes across the container of caesium chloride in his scrapyard after it was sold to him. In the narrative, he discovers it glowing blue in the night, and although the eerie luminescence reminds him “of the dead, of the devil, of aliens,” he is fascinated and brings it home to show his family. As an unfortunate result, Devair is left the sole survivor of his family, and his survival is turned into spectacle: “Open your eyes, ladies and gentlemen, what you are about to see is not for the fainthearted: the glow of death, the phosphorence of sin, the man who shines in the darkness.” If this glowing substance contains the allure of Pandora’s Box, perhaps the sole hope that remains is that some of us will survive these environmental disasters—and, if nothing else, Earth will survive, as it has for centuries, as Colanzi vividly displays in “The Cave,” a condensed epic of the history of our planet.

As the back cover blurb of You Glow in the Dark asserts, despite the diverse nature of each of these stories, “all are superbly executed and yet hard to pin down; they often leave the reader wondering: Was that realistic or fantastic?” This was one factor that drew me to read You Glow in the Dark, and Colanzi deftly delivers. I’ve been longing to read more works that eschew a traditional Western narrative arc for appealing to dream logic. However, there were some moments in this collection where I found myself longing for a little more grounding to understand what was happening in a narrative. At times, I oscillated between a lingering sense of wonder at Colanzi’s boundlessly imaginative narratives or worrying that my confusion had led me to misinterpret a story.

Nevertheless, despite occasional moments of narrative ambiguity, the overall enchanting experience offered by You Glow in the Dark is undeniable. This is easily one of my favorite reads of late, as it is one of those rare short story collections that transports me beyond the ordinary yet leaves me with a better understanding of it. Colanzi’s talent to pull from the traditions of horror and speculative fiction and transform them into something uniquely her own showcases the important role genre literature can play in highlighting stories previously relegated to the shadows.

The following piece is the poetry winner of F(r)iction’s Spring 2023 literary contest.

for Ba (Dec. 10, 1927 – Aug. 22, 2021)

Though it’s hard to take them 
through a grocery store – or 

on a plane – or even ride
them into a conference

panel – or across your cubicle, second
home which is sometimes your first

– horses 

are an excellent emotional		support animal.

          Watch their ears as you prattle on – attunement as if your mouth were a prairie opening– 
          as if your tongue were the grass of their fondest memories. In the 90s, as we traveled hills 
          of Kashmir on horseback, an army lathi jangled. The horse, sensitive. My father’s horse: 
          sensed. Horse reared & swept forth, as if it could suddenly fly, nostrils 

as wings. After flying, it clattered on
          the mountainside, my father –

sensitive to the rock next 
          to his head, sensitive 
to what memories he might

have missed in mountains

                          to come, sensitive to this new desire
for sensation. In 2007, my grandfather burbled, a lack

of oxygen to his brain. I stroked his face as if it were

wet rock, whispered into his sensitive ears, Shanti, Shanti, Shanti.

Perhaps these sounds reminded him of his own 	     mouth, morning
                                                                              mala japa. His burbling

receded. Some years later, I discovered in truly old
Vedic rituals, priests used to repeat Shanti before 

sacrificing horses. Horses are 	         sensitive, you
know, and must be calmed before slaughter. Rituals

today must not be too sensitive. My Dada

survived. Until four years later when
he died. Two weeks ago, I asked

my father how

my 93-year-old Ba
            is. “Ghoda 

jevi,” he says. Today,
we are all the horses

crossing rituals as if they were 	    nations – or 
loved ones – we could visit with visas – with

visas – we too could somehow 	        visit.