Category: l’Hôtel Dauphin

HFR got stuck. We’ve been called back to “l’Hôtel Dauphin,” booked an extended stay at the hotel from Haruki Murakami’s novels A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance. Room service can be reached by dialing )))0(((. Staying here are new guests with stories we haven’t read, all of us searching this section of Sapporo for the sheep with a star on its back. Send us capital W weird shit. Critical essays about Murakami’s work, liminality, travel, labyrinths, astral projection; stories that feature the Sheep Man, the Dolphin Hotel, let’s explore the dissociative spaces that fuel nightmares, fugue statues, and dreams.

Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino, a new collection of short stories by Julián Herbert, reviewed by Jesi Buell (Graywolf Press)

I first became aware of Mexican author Julián Herbert when Graywolf published Christina MacSweeney’s translation of his novel Tomb Songs in 2018. Having really enjoyed that work, I was excited for the opportunity to review this trio’s most recent project, Herbert’s Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino. And, I have to admit, after spending…
Zach VandeZande Fiction: “Imperative”

It is night and the feeling is coming on again. You know the one. There are rules for dealing with this, a blunt methodology we have devised over time. Stay awake. Don’t stop thinking. Don’t let it wash over you the way it does. Find something to do. The knight Wallace makes his way up…
Short Story: “Rhizome” by Daniel Miller

OneYou exit the long or short corridor and enter a hexagonal room with a door on each wall. A room with paint on each wall, too, and the paint in this room is alloy orange. On each door, a numeral is printed in gold foil—two through nine. In the center of room is a table…
Short Story Prize 2017: “Monument” by Kristen Gleason

Joanna Ruocco on “Monument,” winner of the 2017 Heavy Feather Story Prize: “A room in my apartment has windows all around (a box of glass), and the weird shining black-green of magnolia leaves presses up to the glass (a box in black-green). I read ‘Monument’ in that room and traveled from my own black-green world…
Haunted Passages: An Excerpt from ANGEL HOUSE, a coming-of-age horror novel by David Leo Rice

After crossing a vast inland sea in an ark called ANGEL HOUSE, Professor Squimbop docks on a distant shore. As soon as his anchor makes purchase, a town sprouts up that may or may not encapsulate all of existence. At the behest of some distant master, he embarks into this town to teach the children…
Haunted Passages Flash Fiction: “The Cable Company” by Darkansas author Jarret Middleton

A barmaid closing up for the night stopped polishing a glass when a telegram dropped through the slot of the front door. She picked up the envelope marked “urgent” in red and unearthed a manila slip with a single typewritten line. “mechanism operational,” it read. “ascent at 0600. signed, the cable company.” The barmaid raised…
Fiction: Daniel J. Cecil’s “The Stages of Orbit”

-1- Jonathan was drawn back by a force when the airlock opened. It was the vision of the kitchen floor, which was another opening, and another loss of air—something he wasn’t quite expecting the weight of. That day was like this one. The lack of oxygen was what he felt. When his friend returned home…
Fiction Review: Eric Nguyen Reads Sequoia Nagamatsu’s Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone

The fantastical has long been a part of American literature. From Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” to the magical realism in Toni Morrison’s Beloved—fantasy is American and its type of fantasy distinctly so. But today’s fantastical literature is different from what has come before. Writing for Electric Literature, author Amber Sparks dubs this…
Silent Hill: The Terror Engine, an academic study by Bernard Perron, reviewed by Jeremy Behreandt

There was a HOLE here.It’s gone now.—blood graffiti in Neely’s Bar, Silent Hill 2 I never did get to see Hellraiser, though I’d always pause to look at Pinhead’s gridded face on the VHS box at the grocery store, back when I was young and you could still rent VHS tapes at your local…