My first two curated lists of stories took their themes from facts about the authors. This time around, my inspiration for reading a heap of stories with a common factor is that I am in the end stages of finally buying a house with my partner. I’ve wanted a house and a home to call my own for as long as I can remember, but I had never truly imagined I would be able to have one. It’s been a challenging process, but we finally found a good house in a good location for a good price. As such, all I can think about right now—all I will likely be able to think about for the next week or so—is houses, houses, houses, and so I have sought out a couple of weeks of stories about houses.
Perhaps this fixation is heightened even more by the news that my own haunted house(wife) story, “The Bleak Communion of Abandoned Things,” which was first published in PseudoPod last April, is soon to be reprinted in the inaugural volume of The Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy & Science Fiction. I’m not entirely sure, though I am absolutely thrilled to be part of this new anthology series, and to have my work appear alongside some of my absolute favourite Canadian writers. At any rate, houses both real and fiction, for whatever reason, continue to consume my imagination.
Of course, most of the fictional houses one thinks of when one contemplates speculative fiction about houses are haunted. I haven’t shied away from that in my search for new-to-me stories to fit this theme. There are other kinds of houses to be found in stories, though, and I have also tried to find a few of those:
01 September “House” by T J Cimfel in The Dark.
04 September “The House in Winter” by Jessica Sirkin in Apex Magazine.
07 September “The House at the End of the Lane is Dreaming” by Merc Fenn Wolfmoor in Lightspeed Magazine.
09 November “In the Shelter of Ghosts” by Risa Wolf in Diabolical Plots.
19 December “Pulmonary” by Avra Margariti in The Rumpus.