For the final week of January, we have a number of recommendations from our growing team of curators, including from FicStack Discord moderator - turned curator, Melina Chapa. Give the featured authors a read, a like, drop them a comment, and maybe give them a restack.

Wendy Russell, Sass&Sage

Both of my picks this week are interested in the moment something becomes true before it can safely be said — when recognition happens privately, in the body or on the page, and consequence is waiting just outside the room. Although these pieces sit in very different genres, I’m drawn to writing and voice rather than lane, and I love being able to read that way on Substack. The range of fiction here means we’re genuinely spoiled for choice if we’re willing to read widely, and these two pieces spoke to each other for me despite their differences.

• “Teresa at the Barber’s” in On Campus by Caroline Osella, Rewilded Anthropologist. A haircut becomes the moment a character recognises herself — and realises a conversation can no longer be postponed. This excerpt from Caroline Osella’s work-in-progress novel On Campus follows Teresa through a deceptively simple moment: a visit to the barber that crystallises long-held feelings about identity, self-recognition, and what comes next. Osella writes the physical experience of change with restraint and care, allowing sensation, messaging, and reflection to carry the emotional weight. What emerges is not a dramatic turning point but a deeply human one — private courage gathering itself before a difficult conversation. It’s a quietly powerful character vignette that signals the emotional intelligence and thematic depth of the larger novel.

• “‘Smugglers’ Tunnels and Sea Dragons” in A Grail for Eidothea by Leanne Shawler, Mordreigiau Chronicles. This first chapter of an epistolary fantasy in which a young woman’s private journal becomes the only place she can tell the truth about what she has seen — and who she has saved. In the opening chapter of A Grail for Eidothea, Leanne Shawler introduces us to a voice caught between enforced respectability and dangerous truth. Written as a recovered journal, this first entry establishes a richly imagined historical setting where smugglers’ tunnels, family control, and mythic inheritance converge. Shawler’s prose is lush without being indulgent, grounding its fantasy elements in physical care, secrecy, and fear, while quietly building stakes that extend far beyond the page. This is a confident, immersive beginning — a chapter that knows exactly what kind of story it is opening, and trusts the reader to follow it underground.

Melina Chapa, Midnight Letters
When the clock changed and the new year arrived, a new need emerged in me for stories with strong messages that take one deep within for introspection, while at the same time captivate my mind and soul. That is why the two stories I’m sharing with you will make you question what you already know and wonder if something could be different.

• “The Forgetting Place” by Abhishek Banerjee, The Banerjee Codex. What if there was a place that could make you forget everything that you wished could be erased from your mind to ease your soul? Would you be ready to take the price? In this story, Abhishek strikes a balance between fiction and reality, creating a place for people who wish to leave part of their lives behind, making you wonder whether it is worth it, and adding real-life situations that are far too familiar and relatable. If you want something quick that will make you wonder even after you finish, this story is for you.

• “God’s Own Algorithm” by Gaby Brogan, The Anatomy of Reality. In the era of social media and AI, can those be a message from God? In this horror story, Gaby suggests that social media, specifically Instagram, reveals our true potential—and that this can mean different things to different people. Once you decide what to do with the almighty message, there’s no going back.

Inga Jones, Thriller Tips for Writers

I love stories that hook you right from the start, stories where you know the author is a skillful storyteller by the end of the first paragraph. Today, I’m showcasing two very different stories that will keep you hooked until the very end.

• “Skin in the Attic” by Know Your Innerverse. This is speculative fiction, in which one woman reexamines her romantic relationship as she looks back on the past. Tense and tender, this story will keep you questioning reality until the very end.

• “The Murder of Susie Wallace et al.” by Louis Urbanowski, UrbWrites. This psychological thriller also has a speculative bend. A woman who can inhabit different bodies is killed over and over by the same man. It all culminates in an ending that you will not see coming.

Connor Mancuso, Ink and Entropy
This week I went hunting for the kind of horror that doesn’t kick the door in—it calls your name from the treeline and waits for you to come anyway. Each of these pieces feels folkloric in the best way: a curse that moves through a village like a hymn, a house that’s more mouth than shelter, a river that remembers what we tried to pass off as “not ours.” If you like eldritch dread with old-world teeth (and consequences that feel earned), start here.

• “Sleep Deep And Be Called” by Leeron Heywood, Writing From Weird. A village begins sleepwalking—night after night—always in the same direction, as if something in the winter woods has learned how to tug on the human body like a string. When the narrator wakes mid-step with blood on their feet and aurora-light in their memory, the curse stops being a rumor and becomes a map. I love how this one builds dread through pattern: warmth that shouldn’t be there, missing shoes, a voice that feels half-sung, half-prayed. It’s quiet, wintry, and ominous in that “fairy tale you don’t repeat out loud” way.

• “Serrated Edge” by Dblkrose of BSP, Black Spyder Publishing by Dblkrose. A witch in a small town lures a predator home—and the story lets you think you know what kind of horror you’re in… right up until the kitchen becomes a chapel for something hungry. The prose is lush and knife-bright, full of sensory detail (clove, cedar, old paper) that makes the turn feel even more vicious when it arrives. What I’m recommending here is the reversal—the way terror shifts hands—and the creature-feature dread that blooms out of domestic space like mold with a purpose. It’s nasty, gleaming, and deeply satisfying.

• “The Clearing” by lokikone, Wick Inkling. Three hunters pull a wrong thing from the river, and the land does what the land always does in stories like this: it keeps score. The pacing is slow-burn and inevitability-heavy, with a voice that feels like someone telling you a cautionary tale beside a weak fire—flat, cold, and absolute. I couldn’t shake the imagery: the green grass on frosted ground, the mound that pulses like a buried heart, the sense that the river is a living witness with a long memory. This is folkloric horror at its sharpest: you touch what you shouldn’t, you say the wrong words, and the world answers.
  

Sandolore Sykes, In the Inversion Field

Substack just got dangerous again. Linguistically feral fiction is back in fashion. I chose these two pieces because both authors have been published by the dynamic indie press Tiny Worlds, and the two stories take us into another phonemic dimension.

• “Little Man & the Moonlight Darlings” by Sean Thomas McDonnell, Automatic Writer. It’s Sean’s week. New book out, the buzz humming across my whole Substack neighborhood, and this story feels like a small, private victory in dark times. A little man bites people who are “too big,” who carry too much darkness, tasting for who is “moonlight clean.” It’s a dark fable: sweet, pitchy, and quietly righteous.

• “Firecracker” by Jon T, Ferns of Colombo. This one is a cosmic countdown disguised as a futuristic Dewey Decimal system, set in a dusty netherworld Bookatory. The story smells like “off-gassing. Bitter. Dank. A memory of expired medicine in yellowing plastic,” and it’s packed with thesaurus-shattering critters. Every sentence feels like it’s redirecting infinite pressure without (hopefully) blowing the entire universe to smithereens.

Congratulations to all featured authors!

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