Stories

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WFR is proud to serialize The Lost Machine in support of its author and illustrator, Richard A. Kirk. We will be reprinting the entire novel with its illustrations over the course of the next five weeks with a new chapter every Monday and Wednesday. Wherever possible, formatting has been made to match that available in the e‐book. This […]

WFR is proud to serialize The Lost Machine in support of its author and illustrator, Richard A. Kirk. We will be reprinting the entire novel with its illustrations over the course of five weeks with a new chapter every Monday and Wednesday. Wherever possible, formatting has been made to match that available in the e‐book. This part of […]

WFR is proud to serialize The Lost Machine in support of its author and illustrator, Richard A. Kirk. We will be reprinting the entire novel with its illustrations over the course of five weeks with a new chapter every Monday and Wednesday. Wherever possible, formatting has been made to match that available in the e‐book. This part of […]

WFR is proud to serialize The Lost Machine in support of its author and illustrator, Richard A. Kirk. We will be reprinting the entire novel with its illustrations over the course of five weeks with a new chapter every Monday and Wednesday. Wherever possible, formatting has been made to match that available in the e‐book. This part of […]

WFR is proud to serialize The Lost Machine in support of its author and illustrator, Richard A. Kirk. We will be reprinting the entire novel with its illustrations over the course of five weeks with a new chapter every Monday and Wednesday. Wherever possible, formatting has been made to match that available in the e‐book. This part of […]

The following is the title story from Livia Llewellyn’s 2016 collection, Furnace (Word Horde). “Furnace” originally appeared in The Grimscribe’s Puppets (ed. Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.), where it received a Shirley Jackson Award nomination, and it was reprinted in The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Vol 1 (eds. Laird Barron and Michael Kelly). It has not previously appeared online. Everyone […]

“Voices Carry” appears in Eric Schaller’s new collection Meet Me in the Middle of the Air (Undertow Publications, 2016). It originally appeared in Shadows & Tall Trees #2 (ed. Michael Kelly). It has not previously appeared online. — Weird Fiction Review Editors In this room there is no room for words. This room is a kitchen, newly […]

They made a game of it, taking their girls downstairs to the basement where there were no windows. The father had games for the girls down there. On Friday nights, he would drink beer after work, playing records for them. via Pocket

The stories all start the same way. A man goes fishing at night, and because the weather is calm and the tide is moving fast he guides his boat to the glittering vee between the two riptides that meet at the foot of the lighthouse. via Pocket

There had been no meat for too long. Mother’s pups, now weaned off her milk, whined and yipped when she returned to the den, her jaws and belly empty. The squirrels and rabbits had gone, and nothing remained but parched desert and scorching heat. vi…

It has been two weeks since my wife last laughed. At dinner, she shuffles her food around the plate, but doesn’t eat. She goes to bed early and wakes up late, barely in time for work. She moans in her sleep and burns hot, sweating through the sheets…

Out of Gin I had been in the crawlspace for a while, cobweb strands like birthday streamers. I was thinking about juniper. I considered a garden. I debated buying gloves, growing the plants, finding a distributor. I had stepped onto a wet batch of w…

Mitch and me were too busy figuring out how to handle Mom’s new form to take care of the lawn. via Pocket

It is not a good day. They wheel me to the Alzheimer’s unit, the scaly anteater rolled up in a basket next to me. For a while I don’t even look at it, I’m so incensed. via Pocket

Funny how it’s always the teeth. On the news, I mean. Or CSI, one of the two. After all the hopeful posters and the tearful parents and the trawls of woods and the charred remains. After all is said and done, I suppose. After all of that, there’s st…

Caleb had been dead for two weeks when I started pretending to be his ghost. After the funeral, Hudson couldn’t sleep. I lay in my room and listened to my son crying. Quiet tears. A big boy suddenly aware that solid things can snap and break and bleed and end up buried under freezing earth. …

It begins with a girl in the water. My stilt-legged home rises from a dark, slow-moving river; in it, I learnt to swim, buoyed by coconuts. For much of my nineteen years its murky depths held no fear. In the water there’s fish, in the fields there’s rice. In the kingdom of Ayutthaya, none of …

When Jentri was ten her father, having run out of things to say, told her about the name he’d once found written in pencil on the wall above the basement sink, and about how he’d often wondered if it was still there. “Maybe you should look,” she said, and he did, and she followed him. …

The beast in the folds of Harry’s gut had no heart and it did not need one for his was strong enough to keep them both alive. It had neither heart nor mind nor eyes to see; it was only lips and teeth and fingers like needles that slipped inside his tongue and his bowels …

Alix was never sure what kept the groaning rickety-spider of a dock up, unless it was the mussels that swarmed over the piles, turning them to hazards that could slice a swimmer open. The divers were all over scars from waves and mussels, always being pushed into shell sharp as knives and leaving their blood …

We buried the first ones, nice and proper. It sounds foolish now, but what could we do? After all, they were still our children. via Pocket

There he is in the tub. Note the pores on his nose. Note the scarred cheek, the breakout here and there, angry ripe things red with a dot of white all ready to burst. Note the long hair, which I tried to wash last night; I’d put his head under the f…

Delayna snapped the first crow’s neck without thinking about it. She had learned this from her parents. Before they robbed and prostituted their way out of her life and into prison, they had taught her to ignore the weight of sin and instead focus o…

June 26th 18–– A.D. Today, on a teetering skiff, I reached Whalebone Island. Mister Franklin crosses the inlet twice a month to deliver mail and supplies. In three years, he has never seen Loretta’s face. She hides behind a veil. via Pocket

Welch fucks the ghosts in the orchard. Before, it was the alleys, but the bricks of the five and dime were rough and the alley ground too wet and cold. In the orchard, it’s all long grasses gone to gold, the softness of rotting trees and fruit under…

Fade in. The street is ermined in thick fog. The corner of a building solidifies through the mist, all filigree balconies and tall, winking windows. Hibiscus and hydrangea droop over the ledges like spent revellers. via Pocket

The jinn came to Madiha just before dawn. She sat frozen, covers pulled up to her chin with trembling hands. via Pocket

Tentzin urged his yak up the mountain before dawn, high above the prayer flags and incense cauldrons of the staging grounds. It was spring, but too early for funerals to be conducted. Those who died over the winter would need to be brought up the mo…