Author: Heavy Feather

“There is now only light in my eyes”: On Antonio Gamoneda’s Book of the Cold by Peter Valente

Antonio Gamoneda was only five years old when the Spanish Civil War began in 1936. He came of age during the Franco regime, a time when fear, ideological repression, incarcerations, and executions were commonplace. It is no surprise that someone who experienced such a world would not take the representations of reality for granted. In…
“Masks” for Haunted Passages: Short Story Excerpt from How to See Ghosts & Other Figments, a new collection by Orrin Grey

When it comes to short fiction, Orrin Grey is a magician, a practitioner of an arcane art inspired by the likes of Méliès, Welles, and Bradbury. Through literary legerdemain and stylistic sleight-of-hand, he takes the well-told weird tale into a realm of the supernatural, the uncanny, the theatrical, and, most importantly, the entertaining. And entertainment…
Three New Poems for Haunted Passages by Eva Heisler

Call Off the Angels Flashy enough in appearance—and I assume this motivated the selection—the group is much older than advertised.One is wheezing into its elbowwith nasty spectral effects. Anotherstinks of drained aquariums.And who’s that junkyard angelwith the ankle bracelet.That angel is high. Every other wordis either “fuck” or “Christ.”Haloes clinkas they bump against one another—the…
Lifting Myself by My Own Toes, a debut collection by BD Feil, reviewed by Jen Schneider

Lifting Myself by My Own Toes, written by BD Feil and published by Finishing Line Press, is a powerful force—one that leaves us curious about, if not optimistic for, experiences that lie ahead, and contemplative about the past. The collection propels while remaining bluntly and squarely grounded in periods of time and places no more.…
Two Poems by Laura Minor

Big Dick, Small Town I Love You, Now Show Me Your Tits And just like that, the house of whores— If Sunday was a man, he’d be good, becomes the scourge of wooden hours— some digital acquaintance, a high, friend, superior, colleague, or mentor ruefully horny, delusional on their own back roads…
Pharoni, a novel by Colin Dodds, reviewed by Aaron Lee Moore

Thanks to the residual and resounding success of George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, part of me now wonders if we’re now in for a resurrected trope of resurrected characters in literature. This is a sticky and risky wicket. Though with the notable exception of the biblical Christ, in most works of literature the loss…
Review: Dave Fitzgerald on Cialis, Verdi, Gin, Jag, a novel by Adam Johnson

In my younger and more vulnerable years, I used to have a very bad habit that routinely got me into trouble. And I call it a habit, but really it was probably something closer to a crosswired tic—a kind of subconscious psychic defense mechanism—I couldn’t help it, I swear—but regardless, my insistence on its innocuous,…
“Omens”: A New Haunted Passages Short Story by Andrew Bertaina

When the moon appeared, a violent red sphere riding low on the prow of the sky, everyone in the village watched it with an admixture of wonder and terror. Children pointed at it with stubby fingers, asking their parents about the gigantic moon, trying to capture it by closing their hands. Parents whispered to their…
Side A: “Dissections,” a hybrid piece by Jacob Schepers

Dissections Aortic. Sudden. Injurious. A natural violence of the innermost. A seepage that breaks open the layers of the central artery. A spilling over, a rupture of what has just left the heart. It tears you apart from the inside; in that, it builds most often without warning until it’s too late, until you expect…