2023 Story Round Up

Vanitas with Flowers, Bones, and Fruit, by Neal Auch

I’m showing up fashionably late to the “year in review” trend! Normally I try to avoid these kinds of posts, but I have a couple of publications that I forgot to share when they went live, so doing a story round up for the year seemed as good an excuse as any to rectify that oversight.

My first publication of 2023 was and its place remember it no more, published in Nightmare Magazine. (You can also listen to a podcast version, if you prefer.) I talked about the piece a bit in the interview I did with the lovely staff at Nightmare. The piece deals with a number of issues related to mental health and capitalist exploitation, and it’s loosely inspired by the true story of Franz Sieber, a Czech botanist who travelled the world collecting rare plant specimens before succumbing to his own demons.

My story A Song for the Centipedes was published in Three-Lobed Burning Eye. The story is kind of a magical realism take on folk horror and deals largely with themes relating to motherhood.

Cinnabar Moth published my weirdo horror comedy Netterman’s Brand Chemical Drain Cleaner in the December issue of their e-zine. This one looks like a story but, actually, it’s just an advertisement for chemical drain cleaner. Buy more chemical drain cleaner today! (This paragraph was brought to you by my sponsors at Netterman’s.)

My story 137, also published by Cinnabar Moth, was inspired by the true true story of Oumuamua, the first known interstellar object to visit our solar system, spotted on Oct 19, 2017. At the time there was at least one prominent Harvard astrophysicist arguing that Oumuamua might be an alien spacecraft. And what struck me about the story was how utterly irrelevant it was. We had a reputable non-crackpot person saying "hey we might have just seen an alien spaceship over here" and, as a culture, we found this revelation substantially less interesting than headlines like "Donald Trump just tweeted something dumb can y'all fucking believe it?" My story 137 arose from sitting with that thought for a while. Ultimately the story isn't concerned with aliens at all (and, spoiler, no aliens ever show up). Instead, what I find interesting is how people react to the unknown.

(Aside: I feel like it’d be irresponsible not to clarify that the real Oumuamua almost certainly was not an alien spacecraft. I won’t nerd out too much here, but it suffices to say that subsequent scientific analysis has uncovered much less sensational explanations for the weirdness of its trajectory and basically nobody in the astrophysics community thinks it’s anything other than a piece of rock.)

Finally, my essay Dirty Mouths Stinking of Plague appeared in Nightmare Magazine’s H Word series. The piece is a meditation on retributive violence, weaving together a bunch of different threads, from capital punishment, to Albert Camus’ brilliant novel The Plague, to the moral logic of slasher films.

Vanitas with Bones and Flowers, by Neal Auch