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.

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…
Collected Alex, a novella by A.T. Grant, reviewed by Matt Weinkam

IIn part one of A.T. Grant’s three-part novella Collected Alex (winner of the 2012 Caketrain Chapbook Competition) a boy named Alex receives a dead body from his parents for his eighth birthday. “My parents held each other and watched as I inspected it. They were so excited,” Alex tells us. “What am I supposed to…
No Man’s Land, comics by Blexbolex, reviewed by Robert Loss

Because I’m writing this for “here” as opposed to “over there” in the world of comics criticism, I’ll let you in on a secret: no one can agree on what defines a comic. No one. Is it the words/pictures dynamic? Or is it really just pictures-in-sequence, because, come on, what takes up most of the…
One, a text by Blake Butler & Vanessa Place. Assembled by Christopher Higgs. Reviewed by Will Kaufman.

One is perhaps most notable for what it is; a unique collaboration between three writers. Blake Butler and Vanessa Place were assigned the tasks, respectively, of writing the exterior landscape and interior landscape of a single character. They were not allowed to collaborate or communicate at all with each other about their projects. Once they…
Sky Saw, a new novel by Blake Butler, reviewed by Sheldon Lee Sompton

In Blake Butler’s lyrically imagined new novel, Sky Saw, due out in December from Tyrant Books, you’ll find the his name spelled Blk Btlr on the cover and on each page. Yes. It’s like that. I toyed with the idea of writing this review without vowels. But I was concerned some might have a problem…