Story Recommendations – September 2021

For once, I managed to collect the monthly recommendation well before the last minute. Hooray!

As promised in the August recommendation post, there will be several stories from the Unidentified Funny Objects 8 (UFO 8) anthology coming up in the next couple of months. As those stories aren’t free online, I will link to the author websites for instead.

The Unwelcome Mat by J.J. Litke (UFO 8):

The premise really says all you need to know about this story: A medium side-jobbing as an exorcist has to take care of a haunted welcome mat.

The plot was pretty straight forward, and there wasn’t really any character arc, but the story was filled with solid jokes from start to finish. There isn’t much else to say than the story was entertaning. Sometimes, especially for such short story, that’s enough.

***

Black Note, in his Transition to a Supreme State of Wokeness by James Beamon (UFO 8):

The first page or so seemed a little rough, but once things started coming together after the opening, this was a great read.

The protagonist of the story is a superhero named Black Note. He is the only black member of his superhero squad and is, from the opening of the story, suffering from having a voice in his head claming to be deceased ragtime pianist and composer Scott Joplin.

There are plenty of funny moments as the Scott Joplin voice question the whole setup of the superhero group, how inefficient and strange it is. The main plot revolves around Black Note trying to cope with the voice and figuring out how to get rid of it.

It was a great parody on the superhero genre that reminded me a lot of John Scalzi’s Red Shirts (which parodies Star Trek and similar shows). At the same time, though, it was also a profound story about race and diversity as Black Note, through Joplin’s comments, start to realize that his role in the squad is solely determined by his skin color.

***

Fifteen Minutes Past the End by T. R. Siebert (FFO/If There’s Anyone Left):

In this story, we follow a married couple dealing with trauma as one part of the couple have just returned from a space station, which she had to defend from alien invaders.

The author did a great job at revealing just enough information in each scene to keep me hooked until the very end. Afterwards, it did feel like I didn’t get quite as much of a resolution as I wanted both in regards to character arcs and the reason behind the alien attack. That said, I still thoroughly enjoyed the story.

The plot might’ve been so-so, but the prose was gorgeous, and the author did and excellent job at creating an atmosphere of dread and dispair. Every time I read a flash fiction piece like this, I’m impressed with how much some author can do with so few words.

***

There Are No Guards at the Borders of Faerie by Eric James Stone (DSF):

This was something quite different, a story told all in negatives. There is a plot and characters (a parent searching for their lost child at the border of Faerie), but they’re placed far in the background. Instead, the story is mostly told through the descriptions of how the border to Faerie is different from regular human borders.

Honestly, I don’t think this story should’ve worked for me, but for some reason it did. The narrative style was different, and I loved the way Stone managed to imply most of the story rather than stating directly what was going on, letting me engage with the story and its world more so than most stories do.