FicStack Curation #17

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

As we enter the final week of February, our curators have found nine excellent recommendations for you to digest. If these pieces grab you, give their authors a like, a restack and maybe a follow. Enjoy.

Wendy Russell, Sass&Sage

This week I went with two very different Chapter Ones that drop you straight into their worlds and trust you to keep up. One is sticky floors and power ballads. The other is cryopods and cold fog. Serial writing is a peculiar beast — that first chapter has to do a lot of heavy lifting — and both of these openings feel confident about the world they’re building. I’m a sucker for a strong start, and these two know exactly how to pull you in.

• “1” in At Night, by J.M. Gooding, One dive bar. One power ballad. One stranger who sees him like he used to see himself — and a night that feels like it might change everything. What hooked me here isn’t just the chemistry — though there’s plenty of that — it’s the way J.M. Gooding writes longing without apology. This is Chapter One of a serial, and it knows exactly what it’s doing. The dive bar feels lived in: sticky floors, Budweiser neon, friends cheering too loudly. But underneath the flirtation and heat is something more interesting — identity. As an opening chapter, it sets the tone beautifully: nostalgic, cinematic, and slightly destabilising. I’m curious to see what this night means once daylight hits.

• “Part 1” in Orbital Night by Felix Thornfell, The Archive of Felix Thornfell opens with the sharp inhale of a man dragged back from death and doesn’t loosen its grip from there. What I love about this first chapter is how confidently it trusts atmosphere — fractured cryo glass, fog swallowing steel, the weight of unexpected command settling into Jack Garfield’s ribs — without ever drowning the reader in exposition. The tension is clean, precise, and then quietly upended when the supposed disaster reveals something far more unsettling: people not just surviving, but thriving, without the systems that saved them. It’s sci-fi that remembers the human pulse at its centre — leadership, responsibility, adaptation — and it lands that final image of fog thickening outside warm cabin windows with exactly the kind of restraint that makes you lean in for Part II.

Sandolore Sykes, In the Inversion Field

This week, I wanted excellent prose—the kind you can drink, the kind that gets caught between your teeth. These two pieces deliver.

• “University Land” by Andrew Robert Colom, Rap Fiction The title tells you everything. University Land is a story about twin boys becoming men, growing up under the shadow of their “your honor” father. It’s a story about winning and losing—the small crimes of boyhood. The story unfolds through boiled down, snapshotted prose. “His jaw works like he’s chewing words.” “The glue tastes like sweetened chalk.” Across the story, objects transform: the rake becomes a weapon; the leaves become ballots. Disjointed by time, the fragments accumulate into a kind of poem about inheritance, power, and the pull of ambition. It’s so real, how can it be fiction?

• “Pint for Sale” by Bob Graham, Endless Static All of the Endless Static stories probably warrant a content warning. The squeamish may want to look away—but don’t. Bob Graham has made something unexpectedly beautiful here. Because for a story about a man’s brains being squeezed out of his ear into a pint glass, the prose is unexpectedly sublime. This brainless man, somehow able to “keep the lights on at least… like a decapitated chicken situation,” sees the world with terrifying clarity. His blurred eyes register “the definition of each red brick, the mortar in the crevices.” His own vomit streaks “blurred like a beginner’s watercolor.” And as he empties himself out, he begins to see his own face reflected in the strangers around him, watching the breath leave their bodies. A strangely spiritual story of dissolution, rebirth, and reconnection with the universe through unbearably precise attention.

Melina Chapa, Midnight Letters
The last couple of weeks surprised me, in both a good and not-so-good way. I got the sickest I’ve been in forever, which immediately made me slow down from everything and take care of myself. And that, for me, is the good side of all this craziness: remembering to take care of myself. With that mindset, I started looking for stories that felt cozy—and close to home—with a little bit of twists here and there, but more towards that cleansing palate I look for now and then.

• “Existential Beverages,” by Jack Blessed are the Fires.
  I am a strong believer that every drink we pour, taste, and savor has a little magic in it. How that magic affects us is a completely different thing, just as this story by Jack shows: for one, a cup of strong coffee could be revealing, while for another, letting go of inhibitions. The story’s setting is cozy, inviting, and intriguing. There’s a variety of characters and the reflection of what could be possible just by selecting the right beverage and indulging in it.

• “Tale Told Twice: The Tell-Tale Heart,” by Caroline B. and Sudana K. Fairy Tales by Caroline.
  There are stories that I like to re-read every now and then, and this is one of those. It’s not simple to retell a classic, even less to make it in a way that feels so close to home. The main character definitely got my attention and made me feel her frustration and desperation from start to end. How something we do every day, like look at our phones, could be the undoing of someone else? And which is the best way to express it for others to understand? Please, give this retelling a try.

Connor Mancuso, Ink and Entropy
This week when browsing my TBR list and debating on my curation picks I knew I wanted to break slightly from always picking cosmic horror. So where did that turn me? Right to arguably one of my other favorite subgenres of horror, liminal or liminal spaces. And these stories I have curated for this week all seem to orbit the same ugly little truth: Places don’t just hold us—sometimes they digest us. A mall after closing. A hallway that can’t decide if it’s an exit or a throat. A suit of armor that doesn’t protect so much as claim. Each of these pieces understands atmosphere as a living thing, and each one gives you that delicious, unsettled feeling of being watched by setting itself. One of my pieces also ended up being another favorite subgenre of mine, grimdark sci-fi.

• “Dead Mall,” by E.D. Jones Writes Sinister
  There’s a specific kind of dread that only exists in retail ruins — escalators feel like uncanny, skylights look like dead eyes, carpet that remembers each step that was placed upon it. Jones takes that familiar liminal nostalgia and then turns the dial until the building becomes a living biology of horror. The voice in this piece feels grounded, and yet at the same time enough to send you running into the closest safe space.

• “The Liminal Six,” by Bradley Ramsey The Writers Journey
  This particular piece by Bradley reads like an urban legend you found on a forum at 2:00 in the morning back when dial up was still a thing, and immediately regretted finishing alone. Six people vanish for exactly a week, and the come back wrong, and the only way anyone can even begin to parse them is by reversing their speech. WOW I mean really WOW. What I love about this is the format: it’s framed as a narrator trying to assemble meaning from fragments, and the poems themselves feel like a huge warning. The result is panicky and intimate — like the hallway has teeth and the only instruction is choose.

• “Twelve Billion Echoes,” by Rebecca Watson (ReBe) Stay Weird Press
  If you like your sci-fi horror with a huge sense of mortal weight that will bruise your ego. Then this is the piece for you. It opens on ritualized machinery — the Iron Sanctum, Suture-Techs, a neural tether driven into the skull — and the central idea locks in very very fast: Punishment as infrastructure. The suit isn’t just armor, it’s a contract made physical, and the prose keeps slipping between body-horror and a cosmic scale in a way that almost feels like it cannot be avoided. By the time you hit the line about being “the ghost trapped inside its gears” you realize this story isn’t asking if redemption is possible — it’s asking what a civilization looks like when it can claim a soul.

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