Happy Saturday, friends. I hope your week has been a good one.

Ours began with Britta Stromeyer's review of Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia de la Cerda, translated by Heather Cleary and Julia Sanches and published by Feminist Press. We're honored to feature Britta's writing in our pages for the first time — you'll find more of her work at her website. 

This week's story, the second in our month of Dangerous Creatures, is "The Roar of the Sea" by Lowen Oaks 

We also continued our October series of stories, which I'll let fiction editor Lacey Dunham tell you about:

This is our third year of publishing October "spooky" stories, this time with the theme "Dangerous Creatures." I believe that the horror genre—with its roots in eighteenth-century Gothic novels—has something for everyone, even if you don't think of yourself as a horror reader. Take Nancy Connor's "The Killeen," published last week. Even with twenty-first century medical knowledge, birth is a dangerous undertaking for pregnant people, and for some more than others. In this story, a mother grieves her stillborn daughter with a depth of love that is singularly entwined with loss.

This week, we present a more typical tale of dangerous creatures with Lowen Oaks's story "The Roar of the Sea," where an unknown, unexplainable thing lurks in the ocean depths—that is, if it's not merely the distressed psychological manifestations of the lighthouse keepers. Like some of the best contemporary horror writing, both Connor's and Oaks's stories are imbued with an unsettling sense that what we humans fear is just out of sight, just off the page, or—perhaps most terrifying of all—just beyond our self-knowledge and originating inside of us. 

And we ended the week with Court Ludwick, a regular book reviewer in our pages, sharing some research notes about her hybrid collection These Strange Bodies, newly available from ELJ Editions.

Elsewhere, contributor David Rose shared news of the recent anthology Duets, published by Scratch Books. It includes new fiction by David as part of a very exciting lineup of writers.

If you're a past contributor with a new book recently published or forthcoming, please let us know so we can share it in this newsletter and elsewhere. I try to keep an eye out but I can't keep up with them all.

Thanks for reading,

Steve Himmer