If you like short fiction with
salt slow and
Wake, Siren vibes, this rec might already live on your bookshelf because it’s such a fitting companion to those titles:
Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird by Agustina Bazterrica (translated by Sarah Moses). The nineteen stories in this collection are bite-sized pieces of the strange and grotesque. If you like to be simultaneously moved and unsettled (and really, who doesn’t?), get ready for this absolutely wild ride.
I’m a Sayaka Murata stan, so of course I’m recommending
Life Ceremony (translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori). I took it off the shelf to refresh my memory a little before writing this and actually just ended up rereading half the book, if that tells you anything. I love how the horrors are so normalized within this fictional world. It’s the normalness of it, the overarching acceptance, that makes it so unnerving.
Kathryn Harlan’s
Fruiting Bodies might also scratch this itch, especially if you have a thing for botanical/fungal/natural horror. “We all have ways of eating our lovers,” goes so hard as the first line of a story about a woman whose skin sprouts mushrooms.
And if you’re open to a novella, my go-to in this niche is Jenny Hval’s
Paradise Rot (translated by Marjam Idriss). It constructs this feverish, dreamy, bizarre space that still occupies so much room in my thoughts, years after I first read it.
–Oliver Scialdone,
Community Editor
