FicStack Curation #8

Photo by Tessa Rampersad on Unsplash

Welcome to the third curation post for December. Curation Team B has braved the elements and busy time of year to gather some tasty selections for you to read.

Be sure to give the featured authors a read, a like or two, drop them a comment, and maybe give them a restack.

---

Wendy Russell, Sass&Sage

It’s high summer here in the Antipodes, and between the heat and the cicadas I’ve been craving stories with a little cool, a little shadow, and a little something uncanny. So this week I’ve picked two serials that eased the temperature in completely different ways: one light, funny, queer, and delightfully eerie; the other lush, literary, and beautifully ghost-haunted. If you’re in the mood for fiction that slips a touch of the supernatural into the everyday, these two will keep you company nicely.

• “The Warmth of Your Doorway, Chapter 1”by Morningstar, Gothic Fever Dreams. A queer, funny, slow-burn-creepy serial following Sylvester, a man whose curiosity keeps dragging him into something beautifully strange. A late-night text exchange between Sylvester and his best friend spirals into the funniest, queerest, most spectacularly bad decision-making wander into the woods I’ve read in ages, with cosy banter giving way to eerie silence, something howling just out of sight, and a protagonist whose curiosity wildly outpaces his survival instincts. If you love serial fiction that blends humour, tension, and a hint of supernatural thirst, this one is an absolute treat.

• “A Procession of Tears” in The Hollow Throne, by Bent But True. A lush, literary, slow-burn supernatural serial about a professional mourner whose work begins to follow her home in the form of mirrors that breathe and grief that refuses to stay buried. This opening chapter is an absolute masterclass in atmosphere: elegant, uncanny, and emotionally razor-sharp. Mara Vale’s voice is arresting from the first line, carrying us through a rain-soaked St. Louis, a funeral that hums with something otherworldly, and an apartment that feels more like a liminal chapel than a home. The writing is rich without being overwrought, the mystery is irresistible, and the worldbuilding unfurls with the kind of quiet confidence that makes you trust the story instantly. If you love serial fiction that blends grief, ritual, and the supernatural with literary precision, this one is extraordinary.

Sandolore Sykes, In the Inversion Field

My recommendations for this week are for readers who want to really feel something.
Both stories move through time in reverse—stories unwinding toward their own beginnings, pulled by the emotional force of inevitability. Using reversal as a way of returning us to the losses, the missed moments, and the life we missed the first time around.

• “Fall Back” by Ben Wakeman, Catch & Release. Fall Back is a quietly devastating piece in Midnight Vault Vol. II. A man wakes again and again to his life rolling backward, time spooled in reverse, carrying him back to the moments he never let reach him. The story has an emotional intelligence that ripped me open. It may sound sentimental, but it made me want to stop the passage of time and cradle my own life, appreciating it.

• “The Uncreation of Bruce” by Caitriana NicNeacail, Coracle Voyager. This story is a tragic, understated, one-sided heartbreak unfolding in reverse—an international date that becomes a journey through Scotland. As the story recedes toward its starting point, we feel the ache of understated longing and the weight of loss. By the time the ending becomes the beginning, the story has unfolded into a perpetual loop. I found myself rereading it in cycles, each pass deepening the experience, as if the story itself wants to continue on without end.

Connor Mancuso Ink and Entropy
Lately I’ve been obsessed with what waits just outside the circle of light—up in the clouds, above the city, in the air over a village that thinks it’s safe. So for this Fickstack curation, I went hunting for pieces where the sky isn’t a backdrop, it’s a mouth. These three stories all share a particular flavor of dread: something vast and unseen moving overhead, and the very human impulse to look up anyway.

• “Jovian Air” by James Kenwood, Grim Release. This one is for anyone who likes their cosmic horror wrapped in hard science and bad decisions. “Jovian Air” follows an asteroid jockey working the gravity well of Jupiter, where breathing raw Jovian atmosphere is a deadly rite of passage and the pilots who try it collect neck tattoos and lung damage in equal measure. The narrator becomes obsessed not with the danger, but with the singing—a wrong, otherworldly sound threaded through every recording of those three stolen seconds of open cabin. He starts stitching together scraps of audio from other “vape-heads” into a single impossible melody, the way someone might assemble a god from discarded bones. When he realizes the last piece of the song can only be found deeper in the clouds, below where any sane person stops listening, he goes hunting for an old tug pilot who knows exactly what waits in that yellow murk. The result is a story that feels like The Abyss re-skinned for gas giants: meticulous worldbuilding, blue-collar space work, and a creeping realization that the planet you’re exploiting has been singing back at you the whole time.

• “Before There Were Lights” by Thaddeus Howze, Omniverse. This is blackout horror in the most literal sense: a New York summer night, the grid gone, the sky suddenly full of stars—and something else. The narrator is a teenager who loves the dark a little too much, sneaking out against his mother’s rules during a citywide power failure. What he finds on the overpass is not just the usual heat-drunk humans, but Old Pete, a local panhandler who happens to remember why cities really strung lights across the sky in the first place. The story unfolds like an urban legend told by someone who has seen the thing: slow, observational, then brutally specific. Shadows pass in front of the moon. Cars go strangely quiet. Two young men are laughing one moment and reduced to a single set of footsteps the next. The creatures that descend during the blackout are never fully described—just soft, fluttering forms big enough to lift Cadillacs, predators that move too fast for the eye to resolve. The way the community fights back—with improvised fire and a feral kind of solidarity—turns the piece into a love letter to both the city and the terror that hums beneath its infrastructure. It’s a perfect example of how a good horror story can make you look at something mundane (streetlights) and think, oh, those weren’t built for us at all.

• “A testament of an Othering” Poems of Identity Horror. If the first two stories look up, this one looks inward—and then lets something climb down out of the sky to meet that gaze. “A testament of an Othering” is folk horror with teeth: a village gathering around a Spice Dealer after a grandmother devours her newborn grandchild, a creeping illness that moves like frost through generations, and an unnamed narrator whose own curse has called something ancient out of the ruins on the west bank. What starts as gossip about a family tragedy reveals itself as a confession: the narrator’s grief and jealousy—over a former lover, over a child that isn’t his—have curdled into an intent so sharp it cuts the whole village open. An entity is “born into our world” and begins to feed, first as a rumor, then as a toddler-sized thing that climbs through windows toward the slightest flicker of light. By the time it and its swarm of diseased followers are chanting for “a body, my body,” the story has slipped fully into cosmic dread: a chorus of stolen voices demanding a vessel, an entire community devoured by a hunger that started as one person’s wish for someone else’s life to rot. The prose moves in tides—short, incantatory lines and sudden eruptions of grotesque imagery—and the horror isn’t just the monster, but the realization that being left outside the circle of light doesn’t mean you’re safe. It just means you were always meant to be the offering.

  ---

  Congratulations if your work is featured! And thank you to the wonderful FicStack curators making these posts possible.

---

Join the Ficstack community discord by clicking the image above.

---