The week’s best online fiction, with recommendations from FictionDaily‘s Editors
“Six Fake Boyfriends” by Jen Gann, Noo Journal
Quick-paced words. Sure-sounding syllables. Details. A mysterious roommate. Prepondering post-it notes. An apartment. This story hops and skips, but doesn’t jump. The foil for the main character comes and goes, like the feeling in the story. It’s a smirking story. An insidious tickle. But the ending sputters. Ends in a knot. A confusing knot. But not a knot. A not-knot. If it were a knot at least it’d be. But it’s not. But it’s okay. Go and read it and see. —David Backer
“The Sale of Magaliluismili” by Paul Kavanagh, Sein Und Werden
What is the experience of reading Paul Kavanagh’s “The Sale of Magaliluismili”? The author references the aranhas armadeiras, or Portuguese “armed spiders,” known to hide in clumps of bananas and deliver a bite not only excruciating but linked to intense, sustained, mulberry-hued erections in men (priapism) requiring at very least medical intervention and apologies to bystanders. Ferreting through Kavanagh’s prose – his banana bunches, if you will – you too may find yourself bitten now and again, as I have, to my great embarrassment (though the creature itself eludes me), rolling here on the floor of my carpet factory, grasping my great wound, to the scandal of the children.
“Films Made Me Do It” by Sam Duda, Sex and Murder Magazine
I almost passed this one up on account of its monotone title, and I’m glad I didn’t – “Films Made Me Do it” is anything but bland. It is crafted like a frozen blood drop, constituted of some of the most flamboyantly dynamic use of language into one of the most pristine coherent narratives of an insane mind I’ve ever read. Many capable authors flirt with painting the Pollack of a lunatic’s psyche in first person perspective, but few can achieve the balance between peculiarity and properly illustrated plot. With “Films Made Me Do It,” Sam Duda demonstrates a mastery of both – his work doesn’t just achieve that balance, but sprint at top speed across the tightrope. This inflicts just as much tension on the reader as you’d imagine. Bedlam has seldom been as beautiful or as boldly plotted.–M.C. Funk
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