Sunday Shorts is a series where I blog about short fiction – from flash to novellas. For the time being, I’m sticking to prose, although it’s been suggested I could expand this feature to include single episodes of anthology television series like The Twilight Zone or individual stories/issues of anthology comics (like the 1970s DC horror or war anthology titles). So anything is possible. But for now, the focus is on short stories.
Each issue of The Dark features two original stories and two reprints. In the January 2020 issue, edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Sean Wallace, the two new stories both center on childhood trauma infecting and affecting adult life.
Clara Madrigano’s “Mother Love” features a writer processing her fractured relationship with the woman who raised her. The first-person narrative allows Madrigano to slowly morph the story from a standard “cold mother with childhood issues of her own that affected her ability to raise her indigent sister’s child” to something more horrific as the mother’s secrets are revealed. A passive father and a missing childhood friend add to the main character’s insecurity as an adult about why her mother chose others to fill a role rather than her own daughter. I don’t want to spoil the mother’s secret here, because the slow reveal of it – and the dread that built as I started to suspect what was really going on – is so well-crafted you need to experience it for yourself.
The main character in Steve Rasnic Tem’s “Forwarded” is not a writer but a former actor of some repute, struggling with trauma in his own childhood mostly based around an abandoning mother and a drunk, angry father. This time, there’s a slightly-estranged sibling in the mix. Tom, the actor, is drawn back to his childhood hometown by the twin impetuses of weird scrawled messages that have been forwarded to him from previous places he’s lived and wanting to attend his brother’s retirement from the police force. Tom’s angry past and his mistreatment (intentional or not) of his brother seem to be something he’s put behind him, but has he really? Tem balances the potential supernatural horror element and the more human terror superbly through the story. He leaves the reader with questions about what will happen next, but it still makes for a satisfactory and intriguing look at childhood trauma and what motivates us to behave poorly towards those we love.