The week’s best online fiction, with recommendations from FictionDaily’s editors.
Action and Reaction by Cat Ennis Sears, Corium Magazine
This is an evil story. Evil’s in its midst. I lost myself in this evilness. It’s about evil and evil suffusing through Europe and the US. Evil in a clown with a knife. Evil in smoke bombs and tortured lands. Evil in alienation. Evil in entertainment and the breaking down of friendship. Evil in a carnival woman force-fed fat. The story like parts of our world should probably be called “Evil” or something like “evil.” But evil called by any other name is just as evil–and this is an evil story.–Reviewed by David Backer
Cowboy Good Stuff’s Four True Loves by Joseph Scapellato, The Collagist
Poetry is in the heart of any good Western story and “Cowboy Good Stuff’s Four True Loves” has it stitched into the skin and dripping from its open veins. Every line echoes with the power of what’s unsaid rather than stated, a play of prose that resonates with the powerful allure of the prairies’ indefinite and gleaming horizon. The themes of the Western inhabit other elements as well – the lean formatting, the hardship of the plot, the longing in the core of the narrative – making this a fertile plain for the genre to flower. –Reviewed by Matt Funk
The Bottom of the Ocean by Lonely Christopher, Animal Farm
“The Bottom of the Ocean” is a great reminder of all the luxuries you’re free to take and all the rules you don’t have to follow as a fiction writer in the venturesome and highly tolerant domain of online literature. This story begins en route to the airport, diverts to rail travel, makes reference to a ferry (which explodes), accesses wormholes to various historical destinations of interest (yes, time travel), kills off its characters twice by my count and concludes, of course, on the ocean’s bottom. It’s a riotous good time and one of the characters is named Pencil. –Reviewed by Ryan Nelson
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