FICTION WEEKLY # 1 (Week Ending February 18th)
The week’s best online fiction, with links and recommendations from FictionDaily’s editors.
Mice and Men
by Gary Moshimer
>Kill Author
As the central figure in this one, Rosco takes on a desperate and yet comical, cartoonish quality that allows the story’s darkness and violence to be swallowed gladly. The language is both sparse – not a word wasted – and striking. There’s obvious technique here, and care taken. All tied up in a nice, neat cyclical package with the fetus’ movements in the end echoing those sounds of unrest Rosco heard in his walls at the story’s opening. –Ryan Nelson
If You Love Me, Let Me Go
by Viccy Adams
Alliterati Magazine
I usually don’t like second-person stories. I feel like I’m being constantly accused of something. But this story pulls it off well in the form of a pet-adoption clerk walking “you” around to find a “pet” to adopt (but is it a pet? There’s a spook factor here…). There’s a haunting elegance to it, which is a mark of good grotesque minimalism. The voice technique is almost something out of Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. Then the moment of the story comes and it socks you in the tummy. Inviting, unsettling, and engaging. –David Backer
Harvest of Horns
by Garnet Elliott
Plots With Guns
The best myths are those that reincarnate themselves, and Harvest of Horns gives fresh and disturbing form to two mythologies – the Cthulhu Mythos of H.P. Lovecraft and the Splatterpunk tradition of 80s horror. Fusing the lurid 80s spirit with the brooding figures from Lovecraft, the story pipes these themes through the raw voice and punchy pacing of modern internet noir. It makes the undying new again with bloody relevance and gruesome fun.–Matt Funk
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