The week’s best online fiction, with recommendations from FictionDaily’s editors.
“Chez Madeline’s Full Service Station” by Nathan Graziano, Thieves Jargon
Quick and dumb and desolate, a group of men drive out into the desert for sex. This story jumps and stumbles from sadness to sadness, from jarring thing to jarring thing, and by the end of it it’s hard to believe that belief is still possible in a universe that permits Jay and Jay’s Uncle Ed–and anyone else–to be a man.-David Backer
“Step 3 of Invisible Escalators” by Ryan Wirick, Litterbox Magazine
There’s a silly sadness in this story. A mother is doing absurd things to furniture and her son laughs at her, but we find out that maybe the son shouldn’t be laughing. And maybe the mom isn’t so crazy. The story pulls the table cloth out from under us and unveils a twisted series of relationships, humor dancing like a stupid clown at the periphery trying to lighten the mood, but ultimately failing. The pace works sometimes but doesn’t at other times, and some of the details don’t fit, but a tear falls nonetheless at the end.–David Backer
“Fat Man in White” by Kevin R. Doyle, Static Movement
Just reading the title, I expected a piece that was more eerie than anything from “Fat Man in White.” Kevin R. Doyle delivered that eeriness and more – a horror tale that is unsettling not only in its imagery, themes and plot, but in the phantoms it suggests live restlessly in all of us. Doyle’s prose is as plain as a fable, and his tale is just as lingering and unsettling. In an era where horror pieces often fountain with gore or shriek with the disturbing, this story proves that the quietest terrors are sometimes the most alarming.–Matt Funk
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