Quick Sips - Diabolical Plots #57

Art by Joey Jordan

The two stories from Diabolical Plots this month are...well, they're rather weird. In one, a young girl reaches out to the shadows of her world. In another, a man finds himself having to fix something he thinks is too far gone. In both, the stories are grounded by a rather profound trauma. A death. A looming disaster. And they find the characters facing the prospect and reality of these situations with compassion and hope, pushing back against apathy and lethargy. To the reviews!

Quick Sips - Flash Fiction Online October 2017

Well, this wasn’t exactly the issue I was expecting from Flash Fiction Online in October, a month that’s normally reserved for tales of horror. Instead, there are three very nicely paired stories about relationships and the prospect of loss, grief, and despair. Each of the stories follows a narrator that is in danger of losing the person that they love. To illness or a call from beyond, they must navigate how to deal with the weight of that potential parting, needing to decided when it right to go out and pull their partner back into the light or whether it is more powerful, more right, to let them go, and try to find a way forward without them. Obviously there’s not always a choice in these sorts of things, and the stories explore what happens when the unthinkable happens, and what it means for those left behind. To the reviews!

Art by Dario Bijelac

Quick Sips - Flash Fiction Online September 2017

The September Flash Fiction Online is taking things in a science fiction direction. Just like the special horror issue of earlier in the year, these stories are devoted to exploring worlds that might yet be. Worlds of the future. For some of them, that means dealing with the end of the world, or the end of human life. Or, perhaps, about the end of most human life. They become about loss but also about what can be preserved. The stories are also about violation and voice, though, about who gets to make decisions and who must live with them. These are stories that explore situations bleak and dire. They are not by and large happy stories, even when they lean toward justice, but they are fun in their own ways and heavy with emotional weight, an asteroid of feels careening toward an unsuspecting planet. To the reviews!