Category: Short stories

Horror, Short stories

Those Shining Things Are Out of Reach

OJ

I have a new story out! “Those Shining Things Are Out of Reach” can be found in Wilted Pages: An Anthology of Dark Academia from Shortwave Publishing.

Now, I enjoy reading dark academia but I’ve never really written any before this, so when editors Ai Jiang and Christi Nogle kindly asked if I’d be interested in contributing a story, I about fell over myself to give it a go. Especially as I was allowed to take a slightly more speculative approach… Don’t get me wrong. I haven’t gone full-on sci-fi here (tempting though the prospect was), as I wanted to still maintain a very contemporary setting. “Those Shining Things” is, however, ambiguously placed when it comes to time period. It’s near-future, mostly, though informed by historic events.

I was interested to see how far I could push ambiguity in this story; how many things I couldn’t come straight out and say. I’m not, it must be said, an especially subtle writer. When I have something to say I tend to want to hammer it, so maybe this is nowhere near as subtle, or as elliptical, as I hoped it would be, but I still enjoy the lingering sense of threat. A lot of my fiction work is influenced by the dark side of science: unethical experiments and horrific hypotheses, and I’m interested in seeing just how people can get corrupted into behaving that way. This story was a way to explore that. It’s pretty grim, but then this is dark academia.

Sometimes it’s fun to be horrific.

Horror, SFF, Short stories

Lise Meitner Speaks to the Living

OJ

I have a new story out! “Lise Meitner Speaks to the Living” is out in volume 8 of Horror Library, edited by Eric J. Guignard. It’s one of my science history stories, this time about Lise Meitner, who was one of the physicists who discovered nuclear fission. She was invited to work on the atomic bomb in World War Two, but refused on moral grounds. I don’t know how much comfort that would be in the wake of something like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, though… it was still her work being used as the basis for slaughter. That must have been very hard to live with.

In many ways this is a bookend story; the second of a pair. The first of them, “Otto Hahn Speaks to the Dead,” about a chemist who worked on chemical weapons in World War One, was originally published in The Dark.

Meitner and Hahn were friends. Complicated friends, but friends for all that. When push came to shove, one of them went along and one didn’t. That, too, must have been hard to live with. A relationship built on ground seeded with landmines, I think. I wonder how much each of them resented the other, deep down. If they did. (How could they not?)

It was meant to be a two-story thing. Two and done.

I’m not sure that I am done, to be honest.

Horror, SFF, Short stories

Cover reveal for You Are My Sunshine

OJ

My second short story collection, You Are My Sunshine and Other Stories, is out in September from Stelliform Press! I’m really happy to say that the cover is done by the wonderful Rachel Lobbenberg, who did my last Stelliform cover, for The Impossible Resurrection of Grief. I love Rachel’s work – it’s always so detailed and creepy, and the tentacular sunflower here is the perfect example of this.

You can pre-order the book here. If you like eco-horror and solarpunk and the journey from one to the other, this collection might be for you. Behold the blurb:

Sometimes change can hurt. This collection of short stories traces the growing pains of a new world, beginning with the death throes of our current way of life and ending with a world transformed by science and technology, and by grief, hope, love, and humanity’s will to transform. This is a collection that will both tear you apart and tend to your wounds. Cade’s stories are informed by science, tracing the biological and emotional threads that bind us, human and non-human alike. You Are My Sunshine and Other Stories is a promise of what worlds are possible if we allow ourselves to change.

Horror, Short stories

This World Belongs to Us

OJ

I have a story out in a new book! Not a new story, but I was pleased to get it in anyway. “Imago,” my creepy-girls-and-cicadas-in-a-dead-end-mining-town horror is out in This World Belongs to Us, a bug themed anthology recently published by From Beyond Press. Just look at that cover: it’s by Jacob Blanchet and it’s fantastic.

This is a horror anthology. Now, I like insects – most of them, anyway – so I’ll be one of the first to say that bugs don’t have to be horrifying. They’re still fun when they are, so when I saw the call for submissions for this book I knew that I had to send in something. I was working on a story about insects in a haunted house at the time, but eventually I had to admit that it was never going to be ready in time. (It’s still not ready. That draft is dreadful. There’s something wrong with it but I don’t know what, so it’s staying in draft form for a while longer until I know how to fix it.) Luckily for me, the anthology was open to reprints, and so I had a back-up ready to go. “Imago” was originally published in Three-Lobed Burning Eye, but I’m so happy that it’s now available in a book entirely devoted to horrifying bugs.

If you like your creepy things to crawl as well, you’ll like this anthology. Please go take a look!

SFF, Short stories

Happiness

OJ

I have another story out! “Happiness” is a choose-your-own-ending novelette that’s free to read in the April issue of Clarkesworld. It’s a bit of an experimental piece, as I’ve never done something of this format before – and it’s deeply, horribly cynical. It may be one of the most cynical things I’ve ever written, and that includes the bears story that was in Strange Horizons a while back.

When it comes to writing about climate, I admit that I bounce between flat-out dystopia and more optimistic stories. I think the optimistic ones may have more value, but there are times when I just can’t resist the former. This is one of those times. “Happiness” is a misnomer. Every ending you choose, you die. You also die happy. Yes, every time. That happy ending tends to be earned, and not in a good way. The unnamed protagonist – and this is a novelette told entirely in the second person, another experimental departure for me! – is honestly not the brightest. Their total lack of awareness, and sometimes even of empathy, means that they never quite realise what’s happening to them, and how their choices, choices that they’re completely certain of, seal their stupid fate. They’re basically a walking Darwin Award, and they never know it. And because they never know it, they die happy, still in the illusion that they’re doing the right thing.

I quite like the choose-your-own-ending format, which is a throwback to when I used to read those types of books as a kid. I think I’d like to try it again one day, but maybe not immediately. Still, it’s good to try new things, creatively, and I’m super grateful that Clarkesworld was willing to let me experiment in their pages.