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2024 Stoker Award Finalist Stoker Award Finalists

Cora has left her skin lying out again. It’s the first thing I see when come in. Open the door, hang up my coat, kick off my heels, turn on the lamp, and there it is, slouched in the mid-century chair by the ratty sofa. Her empty skin, deflated, black sockets staring at me.

In Nov. 2024 (Issue 146)

Fiction

NotRob

by Isabel Cañas

When my daughter was a newborn, I found I only had the attention span to write micro and flash; I wrote a lot of it. I was also sleeping very little at night and crashed most afternoons, which for me is when the weirdest dreams happen. “NotRob” was one of them.

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- Narrated by:
  
  Stefan Rudnicki + Janina Edwards
- Duration:
  
  0:12:05
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Fiction

Perfect Water

by Simon Gilbert

Something tells you this two-pump station isn’t a contactless kind of place. Google Maps gave up the ghost several miles ago. You go inside and pay in cash. Diolch, you add, your one word of Welsh; the cashier replies with something you don’t follow.

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- Narrated by:
  
  Stefan Rudnicki
- Duration:
  
  0:18:53
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Poetry

Possession

by Martins Deep

This poem was born after a strange empathy opened my eyes to Matthew 12:43-45—the Bible passage where Jesus teaches about demons wandering in the wilderness after a demon-possessed man is healed. Here, I tried to capture the persona’s body as a living space.

Fiction

Little Horn

by Gemma Files

This whole business, it all started right about when I burned my church down. Not one I went to, or ministered at—I mean the one built around me, raised by my very own personal worshippers, so they could do their sacrificial reverence to me in private.

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- Narrated by:
  
  Janina Edwards
- Duration:
  
  0:42:45
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Poetry

A Long Time Afterward

by Sonya Taaffe

This one is a ghost poem whose subject was only ever alive on film: Johnny Ryan, played stone cold and queer to the bone by Wendell Corey in the deliriously Technicolor noir Desert Fury (1947). He haunts the end of the film and kept on haunting me past it.

Fiction

House of the Hidden Moon

by Sam W. Pisciotta

My mother sits at the kitchen table in the moonlight, gazing at her folded hands. “Has your father returned with Lilah?” “You know he hasn’t.” The tremor she had before she died is gone. A tube runs from the oxygen unit, through her laced fingers, and up into her nostrils.

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- Narrated by:
  
  John Rubinstein
- Duration:
  
  0:27:47
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Nonfiction

I Am One of Bluebeard’s Dead Wives

by Bella D. Bonne

The hardest person to be honest with is yourself, and acknowledging the gap between fictions you’ve convinced yourself are true and actual reality is a heartbreak holocaust. But honesty is always the best path to walk, even if it cuts like broken glass beneath your feet.

Fiction

What Happened to the Crooners

by Russell Nichols

On an unmarked road somewhere in the Appalachians, a midnight blue Cadillac rolled to a stop, gravel popping under tires, headlights peering out into the discord of dusk. Outside the car, in the shadowy thicket, cicadas and crickets hollered.