I'm into that. It's very Ursula Le Guin.

Who's she thinking about?

(closeups under cut!)

2024 reads / storygraph

Màgòdiz

post-apocalyptic dystopia set in a dying future world where people are subjugated and controlled by a spiritual power

a group of 6 Indigenous two spirit & queer people traveling across the land to save one of their own who’s been kidnapped & attempting to free their people from subjugation

the last storyteller who keeps stories on her skin on the run with her lover, a healer and their firekeeper partner, a rebel who takes care of orphan children in the city and the brainwashed enforcer xe captures & eventually deprograms

does anyone have $10 or anything for a family of 7, 4 who're disabled, 2 kids under 15, in a abusive house for food and $41 for Dereks insulin that he MUST take to stay out of an er? im panicking as his dosage was upped last year this is URGENT he's been out TWO DAYS please im begging yall we need help to get through this anything helps be it dollar or less. also please help me give these kids food to eat

p3ypal: avatarerin

c3sh app: $avatarpyler

v3nmo: skiesofperiwinkle

k0fi: gothkittygalore

To begin with, I'm gonna list all the stuff that you can read RIGHT NOW, FOR FREE, RIGHT HERE ON YOUR COMPUTER OR PHONE. That's right, everything that follows is easily accessible just by clicking on the link in the title, and you don't need to spend money on it! Also, the absolute longest things here (Orangepeel, Onionskin and the Sandifer essay) are going to take you, at most, like maybe an hour to get through. There's no reason NOT to read these, except I suppose for a genuine and complete lack of interest, in which case, well, you do you.

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SHORT STORIES:

“Because I Held His Name Like a Key,” by Aimee Ogden (2025)

A love story between Alan Turing and a King of faerie. Tonally, this is the exact sort of thing I love: sweet but with an undercurrent of real, if subdued, horror, or at least dis-ease, melancholy, and incredibly poignant. The comparison and juxtaposition of faerie lore with computer science— or, more accurately, the ways in which we think and theorize about the capabilities of computer programs— is just great, not something I’ve never ever seen before, but certainly something I don’t recall seeing done this well and this thoughtfully in a work of fiction.

I’m kind of particular about how I prefer to see faeries depicted in fantasy fiction (though, much as a character can be a vampire in all but name— there’s a lot of overlap between faeries and vampires, incidentally— if a character matches the sort of depiction I like, I will consider them a faerie even if the work chooses a different name for its supernatural creatures). It’s important to me that a faerie be dangerous, maybe a bit grotesque, not abide by (or really comprehend/take much interest in) human moral codes, have a capacity for pettiness, sadism, etc…but it’s also important to me that this be combined with a quality of real charm or whimsy, strong fidelity to its own eccentric rules/protocols/sense of honor, and a capacity to feel genuine affection for human beings. I think it is much funnier, scarier, and sadder if a faerie can really fall in love with a human or consider a human to be their close friend, but simultaneously has little use for concepts like consent, human time scales, guilt/shame, murder being wrong, you get the idea. Anyway, where I’m going with this: there is delightful faerie stuff in here.

“Inside It Now,” by Chris Scott (2025)

This is very slight (both short and not complicated or profound), but I love the central image. I also love that it’s ambiguous enough to hold several different meanings/interpretations: not just in terms of what real world catastrophe it could be standing in for, but in terms of its moral or ultimate point.

“Pearl Ring,” by Ivy Grimes (2025)

A melancholy, funny, wise little fable about being content not to know or own all of a lover. Possibly also about how men are more prone to the folly of interpersonal possessiveness than are women, and about how your spouse’s relationship with their parent(s) always ends up becoming sort of an awkward (albeit often ignorable) ghost in your marriage.

“sharp house,” by Samir Sirk Morató (2025)

SSM put out several stories in 2025, and I would honestly recommend all of them! However, I really wanted to give this excellent flash horror piece its due. Succeeds in being unnerving and suspenseful, succeeds in becoming, suddenly, a tragedy instead of a monster story with the gut-twisting last few lines. Will resonate with anyone who has ever felt like they are a sort of ontologically evil or destructive force on Earth, despite not wanting, choosing, asking, or trying to be that way at all.

“Gowpen,” by Max Olesen (2025)

A surreal, beautiful, very bleak story about prison, or maybe hell. Is there a difference? I feel like most of the ways I could try to sell this one sound like cliches when talking up weird, depressing stories, but it does truly remind me of both Lynch and (albeit to a much lesser extent) Kafka.

“Ship of Shadows,” by Fritz Leiber (1969)

I discovered this one while reading through a series of blog posts (also recommended!) reviewing fiction that won prestigious genre awards in the 1960s and 1970s. Although there is some light, cringe, period-typical sexism, racial stereotyping, etc, and although if you ask me this one kind of falls apart like soggy tissue paper at the very end, I enjoyed “Ship of Shadows” a great deal! Leiber was definitely one of the better old-school SFF prose stylists who was also, still, firmly a pulp writer. The voice here is strong, the concept of a sort of noir-Gothic hybrid set on a space station is brilliantly realized (again, until that ending), and I appreciated the disabled working-class hero and his extremely modest, mundane goals of acquiring glasses and false teeth, and kicking his addiction to space alcohol. (I thought the description of what it is like to navigate the world with very bad uncorrected vision was spot-on, while the description of conquering a physical drug addiction felt like wishful thinking— but Leiber himself struggled with that throughout his life, so I suppose it was!)

“The Daddy-Thing,” by KC Mead-Brewer (2019)

A vampire story, and an abusive dad story, that (probably) never goes in quite the direction you’re expecting on either front. I don’t have a lot to say about this one, but I loved it. Wonderfully written, with a fairy tale feeling. The final image is so ghoulish and horrible that I’m not about to spoil it for you!

“Edgar Addison,  the Author of Dévorer (1862-1933),” by Ben Peek (2025)

I love a good, convincing fake literary history, and I also love it when a story walks the line between romance and horror, between “finally, they each found a person who could Match Their Freak” and “these two enablers ruined each other, or maybe it’s more like he allowed her to ruin herself and encouraged her to ruin him, but either way…” Has a lot in common, on that level and in the use of erotic cannibalism as a metaphor for addiction/compulsion and destructive romance, with this year’s Fleischerei, which I also dug.

“Untitled #5,” by Nadia Bulkin (2025)

TULPA TIME! A weird, enigmatic— one whose weirdness and enigmas rather sneak up on you, since it’s written in excellent but non-showy, conventional prose— story that I definitely need to read again. It has a somewhat X-Files or Magnus Archives-y vibe (in a positive way), showing its central creature only indirectly, through its brief encounters with a sequence of women who don’t know each other. Could be considered a type of “elevated creepypasta.” (New genre term I may or may not go all in on actually coining.)

VISUAL NOVEL:

Orangepeel, Onionskin (2025)

Created by Vesta Z, whose work I invariably like, and his husband Oscar “Pepperbloom,” for an ero-horror game jam, this single path visual novel is extremely erotic without containing explicit sex and somehow feels queer despite ostensibly being a hetero romance between a cis man and a cis woman (a thing I would never say out of wishful thinking/if it weren’t actually true). Vesta and Oscar excel at grisly, grotesque, and cruel horror; wondrous fantasy set in a surprisingly complex and fascinating world (for a short VN whose focus is very much not “worldbuilding”); romantic tragedy whose big and tender emotions all feel completely earned. I cannot recommend this enough if you are at all intrigued by my description, and if you can tolerate some VERY explicit torture and gore. (This seems to “take the place of” sex scenes in an interesting way.)

ESSAYS:

“On Incomputable Language: An Essay on AI,” by Elizabeth Sandifer (2025)

I found this essay entertaining, informative, and a very zippy read despite its length (typical of Sandifer’s writing, in my experience). I think I agree with the vast majority of what it’s saying; you may not agree, and plenty of apparently well-informed people in the comments section certainly don’t. But I think in many ways the mark of a good essay is its ability to provoke spirited thought and discourse in its readers, and not “how correct it is.” (Correctness is the ideal virtue of an encyclopedia, textbook, or how-to manual, which are different things.)

“Enough Rope: Transmasculine Erasure, Violence, and Reading Trans Horror,” by Dave Riser (2025)

I wanted to draw them in their 20s...