Author: Heavy Feather

Laura Eppinger Responds to Instances of Head-Switching, a short story collection by Teresa Milbrodt

The short stories in Instances of Head-Switching by Teresa Milbrodt report back from other worlds in sharp prose that is evocative but never flowery. Milbrodt fuses fairytale or mythological elements with the mundanities of adulthood, but there’s a lot more going on in every story. Strange settings are the background for characters to contend with…
Louis Zieja: Three Ekphrastic Monster Movie Noises for Haunted Passages

Them Ants (’54)“The sounds the giant ants emit in the film were the calls of bird-voiced tree frogs mixed in with the calls of a wood thrush, hooded warbler, and red-bellied woodpecker.” —Them! (1954 Film) Wikipedia It’s a sound reminiscent of rot, of decay, of hunger,the realization that we are just caloriesfor an unknowable colony.…
Three Poems: Lee Hodge for Haunted Passages

HostageAfter Katie Peterson On the night I ended it the police had cordoned off every street surrounding the block to investigate a threat that had been called in on the house across the street from yours. Can’t turn down that road the neighbors had told me before I turned down the road. They pointed at…
“Necessary Reading for Troubled Times”: K, a novel by SFWP Author Ted O’Connell, reviewed by Amy Stonestrom

Ted O’Connell’s debut novel introduces us to Francis Kauffman, an American professor who finds himself in a Chinese prison cell with six inmates, one of which he and the others are ordered to execute. K weaves back and forth between Kauffman’s grim existence in Kun Chong Prison and his former life as a free man in…
Sleepovers, Ashleigh Bryant Phillips’ debut fiction collection, reviewed by Nicholas Rys

I first read Ashleigh Bryant Phillips’ work online a year or so ago. I was taken by the narrator, the kinds of characters she wrote about, by her obvious tender affinity for her characters as well as her razor sharp determination to stare truth in the eye, to refuse to blink. Phillips’ debut, Sleepovers, in…
Haunted Passages: “The Faces Inside of Everyday Objects,” a short story by Dan Stintzi

After college, Michelle had difficulty sleeping. The problem started when she was a freshman sharing a room with a girl from the coast named Miranda. One night, at a party, Michelle drank several cups of a fruity drink served out of a bucket placed in a bathtub. There were chunks of mushed, pulpy fruit floating…
Short Story: “the lies the silence tells” by Carolina Meurkens

These days your arms are covered in tiny red scratches. You can’t seem to get any work done without Jonah anchoring her claws into you. It hurts but you let her. Until it starts to feel good, that point right before she punctures your skin. You’re beginning to enjoy this pain of being needed. Which…
Roundabout, an improvisational fiction novel by Phong Nguyen, reviewed by Noreen Hernandez

The plot of Roundabout, the novel by Phong Nguyen, begins by asking “is this all there is?” I settled in for a lazy river ride of a read, but I immediately wished I’d brought a safety jacket. Because after a few pages the story turned into a white water rafting adventure. Roundabout is a novel…
Flash Nonfiction: “Cancer is missing” by L Scully

I You meet them when they get off the metro. You can’t tell who they are because you’ve only seen photos of them online, but the one with the mullet and 80s windbreaker comes up to you easily enough. They look better online. They’re standing with a man and speaking in your not-quite second language…