The week’s best online fiction, with recommendations from FictionDaily’s editors.

Hidden Away” by Tom Bonfiglio, Wag’s Revue

I’m used to reading conceptual fiction. Way-out crazy images that correspond to theories that help interpret the crazy shit the world eventuates. Barthelme’s The Dead Father, for example. Absurd, abstract, postmodern statement of the senselessness of authority. But sometimes it’s good to get away from the abstract and remind myself that people are fleshed out. We’re full, complex realities. We don’t–can’t, maybe–get fully expressed by theories and way-out images. This is the benefit of realism. And good realism, the kind that speaks well to the reality is represents, is hard to find. This story is good realism. It’s funny, sexy, and compelling. There’s a chase scene and weed smoking and a blowjob, not to mention hated gays, dead cats, good tits, and an oppressed housewife. Oddly enough it’s also about the senselessness of authority: an Old Man that contradicts himself and throws his family out of harmony. Barthelme would be proud–and laughing, crying, and getting hard–if he read it. –Reviewed by David Backer

We Are a Gold Mine” by Richard Chiem, Mud Luscious

The sense of urgency in Richard Chiem’s “We Are a Gold Mine” – implicit in the narrator’s lusty, hot-blooded drive to reach, and bite, the love interest, the “wolves and little foxes” snapping at his heels, a burning house – is attenuated by the chopped-up delivery and the narrator’s distractibility, his attention to remote details, incidentals, so that you get the running-in-molasses effect of slogging through a feverish dream. Maybe it’s like that ribbon bound in a bow, which you pick at endlessly, gnawing – “for as long as it takes” – without its ever fully coming unfurled.–Reviewed by Ryan Nelson

LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN” by Cameron Ashley & Jimmy Callaway, Plots With Guns

With the rich field of the internet allowing fiction to glut itself and grow strange forms, there are many mutants produced from fusions of genre, and LUKE NINETEEN TWENTY-SEVEN is a robust breed. Cameron Ashley and Jimmy Callaway are known individually for their adventurous forays beyond the conventional limits of the crime genre, and this collaborative expedition brings back gems of absurdism, sci-fi, mysticism and unfiltered comedy. It is all mixed together in a blender on puree and it all works, producing a lean-plotted piece that delivers high tension and high humor with nimble diction. No cookie-cutter crime piece, this is words at their wildest.–Reviewed by Matt Funk

 


 
 
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