summer solstice short fiction recs
“Trail Cam,” by Benjamin Percy (2026)
Elevated creepypasta for dinner AGAIN! This is a pretty classic kind of scary story, told with style. It’s always interesting to see the different ways written fiction can try to mimic found footage horror movies, and this story chooses one of the hardest tactics to pull off. But I think it subtly, effectively does some things only prose can do, even as it consists entirely of described “camera footage” and “transcribed” “audio recordings.” I never got that “the author clearly actually just wanted to make a movie (and doesn’t care about or hasn’t thought about how to make this story work well as prose fiction)” feeling.
“The Black Fox,” by David Demchuk (2026 reprint; unsure of original pub year)
A dark, folkloric ghost story with a brutal sense of justice. Written in a very classic style, I feel; I love the combination of rich sensory description and scant, sometimes subtle information about the characters, their home, and their background. Altogether it paints a vivid picture that respects the reader’s intelligence.
“Chicken Finger,” by NM Whitley (2026)
Captures the feeling of childhood really well. Weird, but not exactly horror; more about the inscrutability of adult interests and rituals when you’re a child, and about the eerie portentousness of mundane childhood events when remembered from an adult vantage point. I’m not sure I understood what the story was trying to SAY about these matters on a first reading, which is good; I suspect it’s smarter than I am and will reward re-reads. I like a cipher that suggests, evokes, and promises meaning. The somewhat pompous, formal, distanced close third person narration is an inspired choice for communicating the inner world of a particularly serious and thoughtful, though not necessarily very precocious or socially aware, elementary schooler. I really love the body-discomfort woven throughout, surreal body horror explicitly tied to more mundane ways in which bodies are weird and gross and inconvenient. I think it’s interesting that all the bodies and body parts given real descriptive focus are either unsexed and objectlike or male, despite the POV character being a girl. The story is ambiguous enough that this could be taken to mean a lot of different things.
“The Professor of Desire Presents,” by Anneke Schwob (2026)
I thought this was a really excellent, thematically ambitious tone piece and work of historical fiction. I enjoyed its marriage of experimental/postmodern form and more conventional character journey.
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