As the world seemed to shift and break around all of us, I found myself drawn to stories about rage, resistance, resilience, and even a bit of love.

In “Tell Them a Story to Teach Them Kindness” in Lightspeed, B. Pladek (who wrote one of my favorite 2024 stories, “The Spindle of Necessity”) spins a darkly funny and crushing story about a future where human-created fiction has been outlawed. Only content produced by “curators,” prompting an AI writing program called RIGHTR, can be shared with school children, and every story has to follow strict guidelines. It’s an idea that cuts uncomfortably close to the bone in today’s world where AI is on the rise, book bannings are becoming legion, and many people seem intent on limiting and controlling the kind of information and fiction that children (and adults) can access. Beyond skewering the use of AI-generated, neutered fiction to educate children, Pladek twists and turns the story of Jude, the curator who is supposed to be generating this acceptable content, into a tale that is both complex and unsettling.

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Our present political and environmental reality also feels very close in “We Will Not Dream of Corals” by Mário Coelho in Reckoning. A famous (fictional) billionaire is found dead in the ocean, and corals seem to have found a way to fight back against the “lords of money” that are destroying the environment for profit and power. Coelho’s story has a surreal, sharp edge, and there’s a joyous rage in its biological revolution that I absolutely adored.

The devastation that follows in the wake of human hubris is brought to life in a different way in “Against the Grain” by Lindz McLeod in Hex Literary. Here, we meet a mammoth working in a mortuary, living her life in the strange world of people. She helps them pick out caskets and clean their dead, while also trying to navigate her own mammoth-sized loneliness. A sense of loss, sadness, alienation, and grief permeates this story. There’s a scene with a sabretooth tiger that brought me to tears.

 Another story that hit me right in the feels in all the best ways was “Numismatic Archetypes in the Year of Five Regents.” An ingeniously crafted fantasy story by Louis Inglis Hall in Clarkesworld, it’s an unflinching and harrowing look at the rises and falls of a city-state undergoing several rounds of violent political change. The story is told through descriptions of found coins, as if in an academic journal or museum catalogue, juxtaposed with the coinmaker’s (very messy and very bloody) account of what was happening as those coins were struck. It’s an inspired piece of storytelling where the world, the characters, and their relationships are captured with compelling and delicate precision. 

If you crave a story about the devil, a bailadora, jaraneros, and what happens when you sing “El Buscapiés,” you must read “Dead reckoning in 6/8 time” by Sabrina Vourvoulias in GigaNotoSaurus. It’s a glowing, raucous, hugely entertaining tale about family and magic, about dancing with the devil and trying to beat him at his own game. Vourvoulias’s prose is fluid, whip-crack smart, and funny, even in the darkest moments: “In most Anglo tales, when the protagonist pits themselves against this particular antagonist, they emerge wiser, wilier, maybe even a little damaged—but victorious. Latin American folktales aren’t so generous. My mother was a good bailadora, better than good, maybe the best ever to come out of Veracruz. The Devil must have had to pull out all the stops to defeat her, but defeat her he did.”

There’s always a price to be paid when you make a deal with powerful and sinister forces. In “The Inheritance” by C. T. Muchemwa in FIYAH, protagonist Taona takes on another kind of supernatural entity: a chikwambo, or money goblin. Muchemwa writes with vivid and raw verve as the tale turns from dark fantasy to horror. I love how the darkness deepens gradually in this story. As a reader, I was lured and charmed by the chikwambo, just like Taona, even when I should have known better.

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In “Bokrug and the Boy” by Liam Hogan (narrated by Matt Dovey) in Cast of Wonders, another powerful and sinister force is at work: a Great Old One (of the Cthulhu mythos), who ends up in the company of a bullied, downtrodden, and very lonely eight-year-old boy. Hogan describes how, “[s]omething in Samuel’s stance, in his refusal to cry and run away as the taunts and handfuls of mud flew in, had snagged the water god’s attention.” There’s a wonderful push and pull in the relationship between the boy and the monster, as they both find themselves drawn together by something other than fear and loathing.

The people in the weirdly wonderful and unsettling “They Bought a House” by Osahon Ize-Iyamu in Nightmare also find themselves in the company of entities that ought to scare them out of their wits, or at least out of their apartment. Ize-Iyamu introduces the ghosts: “When Esie and Paul got up for work the first daybreak after moving in, they found ghosts hanging upside down from their curtains.” But what happens when you live with the ghosts and even eat their pancakes and beef curry? What happens when you try to leave those ghosts behind? 

Relationships are also at the heart of “Once, Now, Always” by Ire Coburn in Kaleidotrope. The story starts with a woman going back to her childhood home to see her mother. Returning isn’t easy, because the old place holds memories of an almost-but-not-quite-forgotten past. Deeper secrets hidden in old memories are revealed. In the end, there’s a fierce love hidden at the story’s heart, rather than the monster I expected.

A different kind of monster also haunts the home in “The Path She Sings” by Vanessa Fogg in The Deadlands. In a place where a strange mist turns the inhabitants of a community into zombie-like, undead beings, one man must now share his house with a wife who has turned into something other than the woman he married. It’s a horror story, but also a love story, and, as always, Fogg finds the quiet, heartbreaking cracks in the darkness.

“What Happens When a Planet Falls from the Sky?” by Danny Cherry Jr. in Apex is also a love story, played out in the intersection between two mirror versions of Earth, “two similar realities overlapping one another intangibly for 60 minutes a day.” Two scientists, one from each reality, meet, communicate, flirt, exchange poetry, and fall in love, knowing every moment could be the last time they see each other. There’s a lovely off-kilter, soft, and bittersweet vibe to this story that stuck with me.

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Love turns into something more menacing in the wonderfully dark, quietly funny, and increasingly surreal “Men with Tails” by Rati Mehrotra in Uncanny. Haunted by her mother’s unexpected revelation that she “did away with” her first husband, the narrator scours her mother’s poetry chapbooks for clues. Things only get stranger from there: “Maybe I’ve been infected by my mother’s poetry,” the narrator muses. Mehrotra deftly captures the feeling of someone slowly losing their grip on reality as everything comes to a frightful, nightmarish climax. This story is a wild ride, but it also quietly captures the fraught, yet strong, relationship between mother and daughter.

My final short story pick is the razor-sharp and harrowing “Into Duty, into Longing, into Sparrows” by Nne Ukwu & Somto Ihezue in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Here a young girl is taken away to be married: “You are sixteen. A woman. This is what everyone says. A man comes for your hand. A good man. With six barns. This—they all say. — We will make you into a fine bride.” Tradition and society’s expectations squeeze the young girl from every side. The story tightens like a vice, until there seems to be no way out. But, as this story shows, a way might still be made, if you’re strong and fearless enough. 

I’ll leave you with two bonus reads:

• The Other Lives of Altagracia Sanchez by Felicia Martínez: “a time-bending family drama” that is both utterly beautiful and thoroughly dreamlike as two lives twine together, weaving through past and present and future. It’s a story quite unlike anything I’ve read recently. 
• The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar: “a mystical, revolutionary space adventure” set in a space-faring society that is built around a core of exploitation and inequality (sounds vaguely familiar, doesn’t it?). Samatar’s story is both devastating and hopeful and at times so beautiful it hurts.