What surprised me most about reading Josh Denslow’s new short story collection, Magic Can’t Save Us: Eighteen Tales of Likely Failure, is that while I loved encountering all the magical creatures, the actual humans are the most compelling parts of these stories. Every story, laced with humor and sarcasm, calls out how easy it is to mess up relationships, misunderstand someone, and be so close to another person yet know nothing about them.
Denslow is no stranger to stories of failure and fabulism. Any reader familiar with his first collection will see common themes. Though Not Everyone Is Special is less about romantic relationships, it’s still about life going off the rails with fantastical elements thrown in.
With Magic Can’t Save Us, Denslow leans fully into fabulism. Every story features a different magical creature who incites the protagonist to face some problem in their romantic relationship. The men in these stories are forced to reckon with everything from their apathy, cheating, lack of direction in life, fear of commitment, and everything else that could cause a relationship to stagnate or end.
Despite intervention by the magical creatures and them bringing about some revelations to these characters, these stories do not have endings that provide resolutions. Denslow leaves us in a bit of limbo—except the full title of the collection gives us a clue, and whether these relationships hang on a little longer or even a lot longer, it won’t be smooth sailing.
I never thought I’d be reading a story about a man obsessed with the tooth fairy and be able to call it a good story, but that is exactly what Denslow delivers. There’s also a guy trying to decide if he should eat raw unicorn meat with his girlfriend. There’s a dead leprechaun found by a dog and dropped on the porch. There are zombies, banshees, and harpies—and that’s just a few of them. Denslow works the magical elements seamlessly into the realistic worlds he creates. Like this conversation a character has with his girlfriend when she says people at work think her co-worker might be a centaur:
“No one has ever seen him in person,” my girlfriend continues.
“Stands to reason then.”
“What do you mean?” she says, and I hear this little annoyance in her voice that I’ve never noticed before.
“Well that he can be anything,” I say. “There are infinite possibilities of what’s going on outside his camera view until someone sees him. He could also have the body of a koala bear or an egret.”
“Those aren’t real things,” she says and goes back to her sushi, the conversation over. I cut into a California roll, and it falls apart.
So come to this collection for the fun of the magical creatures and the skill with which Denslow blends them into real life. Keep reading to find some of the best gritty descriptions, funny dialogue, and unique story setups. It’s not all just surface stuff, either. There are deeper truths about human nature and what it’s like to be in every stage of a romantic relationship. In “Tale #9: The Lie,” a water sprite emerges from the shower drain to convince a man to confess to his wife that he lied about the health of his sperm so she wouldn’t feel like it was her fault they couldn’t get pregnant:
The only lie that mattered. The lie I told Tania after I went to get my sperm count checked. Because I didn’t want Tania to feel disappointed in herself. Ever. I’d rather she felt disappointed in me. At the time, I thought I could handle it. That it would be just a tiny bump along the incredibly wonderful road we’d been traveling so far.
Magic Can’t Save Us overflows with life, even if it’s the kind we don’t always like to acknowledge—that sometimes we can’t get things right within ourselves or with our connections to others. And even a magical creature isn’t going to change that.
Magic Can’t Save Us, by Josh Denslow. New Orleans, Louisiana: University of New Orleans Press, May 2025. 176 pages. $19.95, paper.
Emily Webber has published fiction, essays, and reviews in the Ploughshares Blog, The Writer, Five Points, Necessary Fiction, Hippocampus, and elsewhere. Read more at emilyannwebber.com.
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