FicStack Curation #23

Photo by Lysander Yuen on Unsplash

We have seven pieces this week, and no two are cut from the same cloth. Wendy’s discovered a couple of pieces shaped by Prompt Response Lives - a community where people show up and create in real time, and the energy just carries through. Melina came back from vacation needing something that would make her laugh, something cosy, and she found it. I’ve been drawn to stories where the horror lives quietly, in precision: the stitched smile that wasn’t earned, the synchronized staff, the loop that decays one step at a time.

They’re all different. But they’re all worth your time. If any of these land for you, like, restack, follow the author. That's how these writers know they've reached someone. That's how they keep going.

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Wendy Russell, Sass&Sage

Both of this week’s selections come from the writers behind Prompt Response Lives — a brilliant community project where people show up, create in real time, and share the messier, more immediate side of storytelling. While the pieces featured here are from their own separate projects, it’s been a joy to see how that same energy carries through into their longer-form work.

• “Part 1” in The Wheel, by Andrew Thomas. A dad, a promise he can’t afford to break, and a summer fair that feels just a little too still. There’s something quietly unsettling here—everything feels normal, just slightly too sharp around the edges. Jack Colby is juggling work stress, family promises, and the fragile politics of being a decent dad. It’s familiar, even funny in places, but there’s a slow tension building underneath. Time is slipping, things are shifting, and he can feel it. And that final image — the Ferris wheel, still and waiting — lands in a way that lingers. This feels like a story that’s going to take its time… and then hit hard.

• “Chapter 1” in The Cottager, by Jay Wilcox, FOR SALE: Baby Shoes. Good Shit! An eighty-one-year-old mother prepares to travel back in time to save her son — no matter the cost. This opens with grief that feels lived-in and unrelenting, carried across decades and still shifting shape. Jay Wilcox grounds a high-concept premise in something deeply human: a parent trying to make sense of loss. The conversations do the heavy lifting here — family, memory, regret — all colliding in a quiet kitchen as the impossible edges closer. There’s tension in every line, not from action, but from what this choice means and what it will cost. It’s intimate, aching, and quietly devastating — and if you want to experience it another way, Jay also reads each chapter live each week, which adds a whole extra layer to the story.

Melina Chapa, Midnight Letters
I just got back from vacation, and into the routine, so I’ve been full in working mode, which is why instead of my usual heavy reads, I was looking for something that gives me cozy, funny, and intriguing vibes. I was drawn to both stories by their titles, and thank god there are authors who are so good with names! Enjoy them!

• “My elfling therapist said..,” by The Circus Dragon. I haven’t giggled this much with a story in a while. I had to read this out loud to my husband because I couldn’t just keep it to myself, and now I’m doing the same to you all, lovely FicStack readers, okay? Hear me out: there’s a big dragon called Spotty, elfs, humans, and Spotty’s mate. We will learn that he was raised by humans, because that’s completely normal, and therefore, his customs may not be the same as his mates’. Have I mentioned there’s a therapist in this story? This is the perfect read if you’re looking for something funny and cozy, with magical beings and a good twist. Please, do yourself a favor and read it!

• “Episode One,” in The Butcher’s Ring by Marie Howalt in Dreamwalker’s Diligence.
  I was drawn to this story by the name alone, without expectations, and just hoping to find a good read. And indeed I did. In this first chapter of Marie’s new serial, you not only discover that you have more than humans in this world, but also get a glimpse of how the system works. I’m intrigued by how this story is going to play, getting to know more about the different beings in this world, and definitely where Faolán, our main character, will go.

Gary Mucklow, GSMucklow

This week I’m drawn to stories where the horror lives in precision. In the familiar made alien through exactness: the stitched smile that wasn’t earned, the synchronized staff, the loop that decays one walking at a time. All three of these stories know that what we notice—really notice—can become unbearable. They build their dread through accumulated detail, the way a photograph develops in chemical light. The terror isn’t in what explodes. It’s in what you watch change frame by frame.

• The Patient One by Fragments and the Dark. The bear came with the house. It has a smile stitched too wide, the way a smile looks when someone is doing it from memory rather than feeling, and it has been studying Marcus ever since. Fragments and the Dark writes from a flat, forensic remove: the therapist, the girlfriend’s coat folded neatly on a passenger seat two towns over, the police officer who puts the bear in an evidence bag and watches it in his rearview mirror all the way home. The facts arrive quietly; the shape of what they add up to arrives all at once. And the final line delivers its verdict in one cold sentence. At 302 words, this is as compressed as fiction gets.

• The Manor That Kept by Dream of Electricscapes. The manor has been there since before the town, encoded into the charter, waiting. The story never names what the Family does to the young men strapped to the chair, and it doesn’t need to. Malrik Raithmoor earns his horror through accumulation: the trolley crashing through every door, the staff moving in synchrony, the relic lifted into bent light. The Surgeon’s corruption arrives in stages you can measure: hesitation, efficiency, fervour, the scalpel turned inward. When love finally breaks the spell, the story has left only one exit. A piece with heavy content warnings that earns every one of them.

• The 7th Street Loop by The Poetic Pause.The code is three flashes of light, and she has already forgotten she has seen them before. Andrea writes the loop from inside it: the thud of boots on concrete, the house still visible behind her no matter how long she has been walking, the wound on her hand that arrives and disappears and arrives again. The horror is the walking. Each time the world decays a little further, the sidewalk going viscous under her heel, and she notices, and keeps walking. The story ends mid-loop. Of course it does.

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