Hey Everyone,

I hope life’s been treating you well wherever you’re at. Thanks for stopping by for another one of these fun, little (that part’s a lie), newsletters. In this one I’ll be talking about putting together short story collections, previewing the first two sections of my novelette, The Final Sight, and sharing Kristina Ten’s top 5 short stories. I hope you enjoy all of it :)

On Putting Together Short Story Collections

So, as some of you may know, I had an eco-horror short story collection (Haunted Ecologies) come out in February on Valentines Day (a weird day for a horror release for sure...especially one about a collapsing world...but I guess it puts some people in the mood...whatever floats your boat). It contains about eight years worth of short stories, which seems like an awfully wide spread...the Corey at the beginning of the collection is certainly not the Corey who finished it. 

When I think about some of my favorite collections that had a huge impact on me when I was first starting out, I think of Kelly Link's Get in Trouble, Karen Russell's Vampires In The Lemon Grove, George Saunders' Pastoralia, Aimee Bender's Willful Creatures, and Nathan Ballingrud's North American Lake Monsters. I look at most of them and think, these are just their greatest hits from a time period of their careers (aka…everything these writers create is pure gold. WHy not just slap all that goodness between two covers???)...not so much themed collections. That's what I originally did with my first collection, just threw all of my favorite stories together and was like, here we go...perfection. 

And then I talked to my agent (who is very wise and kind). She said, these are great! Love the stories! So fun! So Spooky! But wow is it hard to sell an unthemed collection right now (or any collection for that matter :( ). And then I said, but George Saunders does it! Karen Russell does it! And then my agent said, Unfortunately, you are not George Saunders or Karen Russell (yet...metaphorically speaking only...I'm not trying to become anyone's doppelganger...but it would be nice to have a short story in the New Yorker...have you seen their pay rate per word???).

Which is fair and true.

After that, we worked on pulling apart the themes in the book and realized they fell into basically two categories, Eco-Horror and Friendship/Basement Horror. The Eco side was very fleshed out...the friendship/basements side still needed a few more stories, so we went with the eco-collection first...and I'm glad we did.

Once the decision was made, I sifted through my published work to see all combinations of stories that would make sense. After I did this, I came to the realization that most of my eco stuff falls into two categories: Spooky stuff in the woods and Spooky stuff by the ocean (I considered calling Haunted Ecologies The Things in the Woods/The Things in the Sea for a while, but let that one go...it would have been a very accurate title though). So within that framework, I needed to make sure the collection wasn't hitting only two notes, so I left some of the forest/sea stories for a later collection to incorporate a few more that weren't so tied to these geographic locations (did some of those eco stories have basements in them? If yes, into the next collection they go!).  

And then within that, I tried to create a balance of tones ranging from humorous to WOW THAT'S BLEAK. And then variations on story length...I always love to include a good mix of flash fiction pieces nestled in there with my longer stories. It gives readers a little break from the big fellas...and also gives you a number of quick stories to read at different events. (That's my one major piece of advice for anyone putting together a collection. Throw some flash in there so you have options for complete stories to read at your bookstore/library/writing conference events...some people get sleepy if you read one story to them for half an hour(that person is me)).

If you pick up Haunted Ecologies, you can see how all these decisions played out...so maybe you want to do that? Maybe?

Many authors I admire have perfect themed anthologies out these days. The first that comes to mind is A.C. Wise's Ghost Sequences...which is all ghost stories/stories with ghosts in them. And then I think of John Langan's body of work over the last few years. Each of his collections has a wicked long subtitle that tells you exactly what type of stories you're getting: Sefira and Other Betrayals / Corpse Mouth and Other Autobiographies / Lost in the Dark and Other Excursions / etc...Scott J. Moses's Hunger Pangs is all Grief Horror . Kay Chronister has Thin Places...which are all stories that take place in liminal spaces/very-off/uncanny locations. And I get it. The theme draws a reader in, lets them know what to expect. It's a kindness (and also a marketing ploy! Hurray for marketing ploys!). 

So, I guess what I'm saying is, When you put together a collection, think about your shared themes/images/motifs/etc...or publish a few stories in the New Yorker. Those are your two options. Good luck with the writing (or reading if you're just here as a reader).

Kristina Ten’s Top 5 Stories

I’m very excited to have Kristina stopping by to share five of her favorite stories with us. I’ve been so pumped for her short story collection, Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine, to fly out into the world on October 7th. She sits in a similar genre space to Kelly Link and Karen Russell, and if you’ve been reading these newsletters, you know those are two of my favorite writers doing there thing these days. If you want a sample of her work, her novelette, Bunny Ears, over in Nightmare Magazine is a great place to start!

“The Semplica-Girl Diaries” by George Saunders in Tenth of December

I’ll probably never shut up about this story as long as I live. It’s ostensibly a story about keeping up with the Joneses, told in a series of journal entries written by a father consumed by anxieties around class, status, and his children’s happiness. Which is familiar enough ground, until the dystopian revelation comes in. I won’t give it away here, except to say: lawn ornaments of my nightmares. This concept would be plenty gripping and unnerving on its own, but what really makes the story, for me, is the voice. The father’s writing is frenetic, filled with sentence fragments, abbreviations, and missing articles and pronouns. At the same time, it’s confessional: the day-to-day of an exhausted striver who can’t pause long enough to interrogate his role in this exploitative system. His voice is so swift and absorbing that, when the horror comes, it yanks my feet out from under me.

“Who Will Greet You at Home” by Lesley Nneka Arimah in What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky

A modern fairy tale set in a world where women must craft babies out of natural materials—yarn, sand, mud—then take care of them for a year before the children can take flesh-and-blood form. The protagonist, Ogechi, makes her baby out of hair left on the floor of the salon where she works as a hairdresser, and the child grows ever more demanding until… Well, things don’t go exactly as planned. It reminds me of the hard-boiled eggs us girls had to carry around for a week in middle school, for a grade. Arimah’s whole collection is incredibly tactile. In “Who Will Greet You at Home,” a silk baby is a loved baby (or so Ogechi thinks), while a yarn baby is too fragile to have a promising future. Another story, “The Future Looks Good,” is itself shaped like a ball of yarn: threads twisted and buried so you can’t find their ends, until it all comes undone.

“The Vane Sisters” by Vladimir Nabokov in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

This is the first story I remember reading that didn’t seem to only be about a haunting, but that seemed to be haunted itself. There’s a trick ending (would we expect any less from puzzle-loving Nabokov?): the first letters of each word in the final paragraph spell out an acrostic that serves as a key. Find it, and you’ll catch a glimpse of the ghostly presence manipulating the narrator’s words without him even knowing. It still gives me shivers, the way those letters reach up like fingers from a grave. Apparently Nabokov sent the story to The New Yorker, but the editor didn’t notice the acrostic device and declined to publish. Then Nabokov wrote to her to explain, which… Well, everybody knows replying to rejection letters is a no-no, but if you’ve read Nabokov’s interviews, this won’t surprise you. The story ended up being published eventually, in 1958 in The Hudson Review.

“How to Talk to a Hunter” by Pam Houston in Cowboys Are My Weakness

 This is the story I’ll send to anyone who starts badmouthing second-person POV in front of me. Will just send it to them right on the spot. Houston’s second person has all the intimacy and immediacy of first person, plus third person’s possibility of distance and omniscience—introduced in the Greek-chorus-esque passages offering love advice from the “best female friend” and the “best male friend.” It’s a fitting perspective for a story about the dizzying oscillation between closeness and remoteness that can exist in the kind of relationship the protagonist finds herself in: one marked by indecision, insecurity, and miscommunication. There’s so much longing, so much ache. It’s a story about what it means to be wanted, but not the way you really want to be.

“Over Flat Mountain” by Terry Bisson in Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories

 Tough to choose a favorite from this collection. If I could wave my hand generally over the front half, which also includes the awesome, dialogue-only “They’re Made Out of Meat” and “Press Ann,” I would. “Over Flat Mountain” stands out for its worldbuilding, delivered so organically and selectively that it makes a story set in a peculiar, post-natural-catastrophe future feel lived-in and perfectly down-to-earth. No small feat, since the protagonist is a long-haul trucker navigating a section of the Appalachians—except now these mountains have been mysteriously “uplifted” to a whopping eighteen miles high. Truckers need specialized gear and a different level of nerve to survive the airless environment. Enter a young hitchhiker, and this becomes my go-to example of a high-concept story that’s character-driven (forgive the trucker pun) and packed full of heart. 

And here is all you need to get psyched to check out Kristina’s stories!!!

ABOUT TELL ME YOURS, I’LL TELL YOU MINE

A strange and sinister debut from Stephen Dixon Award-winning author Kristina Ten    

The new kid in school discovers a diabolical presence in the depths of an English-language-learning CD-ROM. A desperate and declining empire designs an elaborate matchmaking system around cootie catchers and soda-can tabs. A former varsity volleyball player reopens the grisly wounds of her youth, haunted by a lost friend. In each story, the game has been twisted. In each game, players must make their own rules. Through a bloody, shattered lens, the artifacts of growing up take on a new and disquieting power—riddles remain unsolved, pranks have perilous stakes, and superstitions won’t save you.  

Populated by living paper dolls, summer camp legends, and trivia nights gone terribly wrong, the twelve genre-crossing tales in Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine wrestle with themes of memory, disobedience, alienation, belonging, and the horrors of inhabiting a body others seek to control. 

Don’t miss out on this one :)

So, earlier this year my buddy, Eric Raglin, reached out to me about possibly contributing an eco-horror piece to a split collection he wanted to do with Tiffany Morris (you might know Tiffany from her collection Green Fuse Burning). I’ve only received a handful of solicitations in my life, and I’m always extremely flattered when it happens…and when it happens, I always want to do something wicked weird, because, hey…someone asked me for it. So I wrote a novelette called the Final Sight for the collection. I’ve been pitching it to people as Princess Mononoke meets True Grit in a post-apocalyptic desert landscape. I had a blast writing it and had a lot of fun playing around with style and form (the very short chapters jump around in POV and the voice is not one I usually write in). If that sounds like your jam, you can pre-order it HERE!

Eric gave me the go ahead to share the first two sections of the Final Sight. I hope you enjoy them:

1.      Merek

They sit with binoculars raised, concave lenses staring across the chasm to the green expanses beyond, verdant trees in full bloom, bird song glimpsed, but never heard. Some haven’t moved in days. Some in weeks. The stench is awful. The rusting beach chairs crumble beneath their reclined forms, holdovers from ages past, when there were actually beaches. Their stare never drifts down to what seethes in the pit, what keeps them from spanning the distance to inhabit that other realm of evergreen splendor. There’s a reason the Watchers don’t leave their seats. There’s a reason they have accepted the lives they’ve inherited. The withering. The supposed glory of the final sight. The realm after this realm.

It is said that the last sight you see upon death, that will be the space your mind inhabits for the rest of eternity, the promised heaven you could never step foot in while your lungs drew breath. That is why half of the chairs are filled with the dead, heads lulling, binoculars stolen by the next generation of devotees.

But we will not be like them.

We will not press those lenses to our eyes.

The chasm drops away just beyond the Watcher’s boots, hundreds of feet down, incline steep, almost unscalable. I still don’t know how those creatures survive the fall. The jagged rocks. The sudden stop. But there they are, the warped amalgams of deer and gull and bear and coyote and shrew. If the Watchers were to tilt their binoculars down, they’d view the broiling mass, bodies welded together, muscle and sinew stitched through chemical exposure and drinking water residue, all those compounds that should never have existed in the soil, in the air, flesh folding into flesh. They amble and shiver like leaves in the wind, life fled from eyes, yet still somehow present in their limbs. They tear at those who try to make the crossing, those that descend the lone ladder to the base of the gorge, to where our neighbors had corralled the monstrosities for generations, never realizing they were sealing off their one escape route, their one chance to avoid the same end.

For a time, the gathering horde hadn’t been more concerning than everything else in our blood-blighted lives. Food was scarce. Drinking water the same. So we worried about those immediate things … and other things. The regional territorial wars. The rise and fall of cul-de-sac fiefdoms. The blood mold. The night vanishers. The cannibal cults. The cannibal religions. The so-called cannibal deities. The amalgams were low on our priority list. Low until more human shapes started to amble about the gorge. No one noticed their warped neighbors descend the ladder, the way growths twisted arms, their necks, the muscles in their face. The way a frog might meld with the skin on a leg, how a horse might drag them forth as a forever rider, a haunted centaur grafted at the wrong angle. But there was no doubt, the amalgams called to other amalgams, drawn like magnets to cursed metal.

And it was happening fast, our populace dwindling even more than it had dwindled from all the other horrors, the wars and the pox and the cannibalism.

The only way we’re going to avoid the grafted end times is by crossing the chasm, actually setting foot in that green world where every berry doesn’t contain traces of poison, where flowers don’t offgas chemicals slumbering in the soil beneath.

Some in our small town listen to me.

Some do not.

Some are willing to leave, to drop down the ladder and try to ford the sea of corrupt flesh.

Some prefer to wait for what is to come, to join the Watchers in their cryptic calendars, that final sight anchoring consciousness, heaven glimpsed for all eternity though feet never travel the winding paths of splendor.

One month. That is what I give my followers. My friends and relatives and occasional rivals. One month to prepare, to gather a life into a pack, to learn how to defend oneself, to obtain the means to defend oneself. The pilgrimage has been made before. Or so it’s said. But who can ever believe a story?

Slow death or possible salvation.

Those are the only two options left.

So we leave in one month.

I pray we are ready.

2.      Breeze

Mom says we’re leaving. Mom says Dad is already in the pit. Mom says there was no way we could have saved him. Mom doesn’t say how it happened, or why, or which of the cannibal gods cursed us. All she says is we’re leaving with Merek and the others, that there isn’t much time.

You can hear them, down there at night. The cries. The animal barks. The yowling and cackling and throaty warble. It’s why I first walked to the edge. Mom would kill me if she knew, but I thought I heard Dad’s voice, thought I caught his pleading tongue on the wind, lifted from the beasts below. I took the binoculars from one of the dead Watchers. He didn’t need them anymore. The moon was full, so I had the silver light to go by. I sat, legs dangling over the edge, peering into the thousand thousand flailing limbs so far below, looking for my father’s kind face, for his gaunt body, for whatever was left of him before his skin became the skin of another.

We drank the same water. Ate the same meat. Played soccer each night. Worked the garden each morning.

We only slept one room apart.

I didn’t know why it would come for him. Why it wouldn’t come for me.

Dad would have been able to help mom cross. He was strong, good with a blade, quick with a thought. I’m small. I know how to urge plants to grow from our sick soil, but little else. That’s all I thought I’d ever need to know. How to get the beans to sprout, the potatoes to thicken, the onions to resist the rot. So few in our town have a green thumb, cursed gardens foresting most backyard plots. I knew my life’s trajectory, at least before our neighbors started to disappear. Before they started to reappear. Now, all of my garden beds will be abandoned. One final harvest, seeds saved for future sewing, and down the ladder.

Through the binoculars, I saw the bulk of a bear with a dog’s head rising from its back, jaws snapping and snapping. I saw a flock of vultures tumbled together, wings only good to jostle them against the hard-packed soil. I saw things that should still live in the ocean, though the ocean is hundreds of miles away and full of toxins. Tentacles. Beaks. Eyes once intelligent, now muted.

There were the men and women, bare skin turning green, all breeds of life fused to their bodies in a pulpy organic mass. Some traveled on all fours. Others were left with a single functioning arm to pull themselves along the dust. At once, they seem separate, but at others, I have trouble telling one from the next. It’s as if some thin sinew runs between all, many organisms trapped in one organism, but I don’t know[EH4] [MOU5] . It was dark out, impossible to see clearly.

It must have been hours before I saw my father. I didn’t know what the thing that now rode his back had once been. Turtle or amphibian or newborn cow? He struggled to lift the weight, to stumble forward, eyes dead, raised to the moon, face washed in silver.

I couldn’t mistake the pain.

When we go down there, I’ll save him the only way we know how. Merek has been handing out the pikes, the daggers tied to rake handles, improvised spears of weather-hardened wood. Long-distance weapons he calls them. Keeps them at bay. But I don’t want to keep my father at bay. I want to let him see heaven, not remain trapped below.

If he had only seen fit to train me with a blade instead of just playing games, kicking the rope ball endlessly around our plot…

A month is rarely enough time to learn.

This month the sci-fi / fantasy / horror short story group I run at the library is between books while we wait for the next Best Amercian Science Fiction and Fantasy to come out. That means I get to choose some of my favorite reads available on the internet. For our first meeting I went with The Women Who Sing For Sklep by Kay Chronister and Sundogs by Laura Mauro.

The Women Who Sing For Sklep (first published in her collection Thin Places) is Weird Dark Academia about two dudes in the 1800s (?) who visit the town of Sklep in the boonies of some European country. The women there are able to sing and bring the rains, but have been refusing to do so. The main character really wants to hear them sing because he studies music, and that’s the whole reason they are out there…to what lengths will he go to make them sing??? Read and see (there’s also some weird siren-esque stuff going on in there too). Can’t recommend this one enough.

Sundogs by Laura Mauro (published in her collection Sing Your Sadness Deep / the Dark) is a little harder to talk about than Sklep without giving away too much. It's at times tender and gruesome and the title really is perfect given what happens in those pages. It’s about the child of doomsday preppers sneaking away in the family car at night, almost getting into an accident, and finding an injured girl (???) in their backseat when the dust settles. Rumors have been circulating about terrible things happening at night in the nearby desert. How are these two incidents connected??? You’ve got to read it to find out. The language here is so beautiful. Don’t miss it.

Upcoming Events:

If you've made it this far, thanks again for stopping by…Remember how last week I said I’d try to make these shorter??? Well, that was a lie (kind of ironic for a newsletter about SHORT stories)! Anyway, I hope you get some excellent short story reading out of all those words. Get excited for next month. We will have Nadia Bulkin stopping by with her five favorite stories and a little bit about her own recently published collection, Problems With Authority. Nadia is one of my favorite writers of Weird/Horror/Dark Fantasy working today, so that will be a treat.

And as always, here are links where you can find my books:

Haunted Ecologies

Living in Cemeteries

Until next time, be well!

-Corey