finding the literature vol. 11

spotlighting Substack fiction

Whenever you start adding a lot of Notes to a post it quickly gets too long for email. View this in your web browser for best reading.

Welcome to finding the literature!

Today I recall a scene from the recently released movie Freakier Friday (which I half-watched as my wife fell prey to its nostalgia) that went something like this [approximate]:

[A fortune teller across from a barista.]

BARISTA: What about my writing career?

FORTUNE TELLER: You will have success in more…genre-type stuff.

BARISTA: Okay, but like…elevated genre?

FORTUNE TELLER: sad smile and shake of head

BARISTA (WRITER): crestfallen

A humorous, self-referential nod from the writers I suppose.

I never knew genre fiction needed defending until I came to Substack. Never mind that genre writers like in the thriving horror scene are some of the best fucking writers on Substack (looking at you Sean Thomas McDonnell). Or those in sci-fi (Andy Futuro, M.P. Fitzgerald).

Which brings me to:

The Midnight Vault II | The Entire Vault

After spending some time reading through these Midnight Vault stories late last year, you can reach your own conclusion about the state of Substack fiction in the genre space; but if you read some of the same ones I did, I can’t help but think you’ll be impressed.

I contributed to the first Midnight Vault edition with a story and I have to say, it’s one of the things I’m most proud of. If Substack deleted my account tomorrow, whenever I’d tell my kids about my time here, one of the first things I’d mention is this Midnight Vault thing and how I was in it. This second edition was brought to life by Bryan Pirolli and J. Curtis and Shane Bzdok.

Midnight Vault is one of the best things on Substack. Not just Substack Fiction, but Substack. Period. (Substack Team should be all fucking over this!!!)

(By the way, there were some editors active on Substack that helped polish these stories— Emil Ottoman was one of them. Considering helping him out of a tough situation, if only because he is a good editor and a good writer.)

Anyways, it got me thinking about the many genre writers I’ve always enjoyed on Substack.

I’ve already shared a lot of them in previous finding the literatures—but here are a few new ones I pulled from reading the recent Midnight Vault, mostly of the sci-fi persuasion.

My apologies to the many plethora of fantasy and mystery writers on here—it’s just not in my wheelhouse of taste, but I am making a commitment to reading more of it, perhaps starting with Tom Schecter and his Shieldbreaker Saga, of which I have heard great things.

(And actually, there’s a lot of good sports stuff happening too — Peter Smetanick!)

I’ll be back with a whole host of more contemporary/lit folks next time. I’ve discovered so many in that realm it’s been hard to keep up! But I just gotta get this one out of the way first.

Without further ado—here’s vol. 11—

Ian Patterson is an award-winning sci-fi author. So I shouldn’t have been surprised to find how good this short story was. The best science fiction has real-life parallels, and I think this one actually has a few besides the AI jobs/middle management thing—there’s also a people displacement theme that has only become unfortunately more pertinent in recent months.

Just re-reading this short excerpt, it’s apparent how skilled a writer Ian is, and it seems to be paired with good storytelling as well. So often I encounter writers with one and not the other, and I regard them as sort of separate skills (I’ll leave that alone for now). Of course, he’s a self-published author so I feel a certain kinship with him. I think I have a lot to learn from Ian!

As I said in this Note, while I took the opportunity to read some Midnight Vault stories of those I’d heard of but maybe never read, but I don’t think I’d ever even seen E.B. Howard around before! Just goes to show—even someone like me who is on Substack way too much can have blind sports in their presenting algorithm. That’s really what finding the literature is all about—trying to beat that darned algorithm.

The great thing about genre fiction is you have such a wealth of established tropes to kind of play with and invert. As I note here, the ‘second chance’ tales are a kind of variation of ‘Groundhog Day’-type stories. The main character makes an interesting choice in the end, and I liked the Rod Sterling voice interlays in this one. I tried to do that directly within my prose in my own Midnight Vault entry, it’s a lot of fun.

It looks like EB has a serial of episodic speculative fiction which I haven’t read, but it’s something for you to try out if you like their vibe.

Evelyn K. Brunswick has one of the more unique styles I’ve read on the ‘stack in recent memory. I returned to this piece to find the prose even bouncier and more fun than I remembered. I like the character description here—it’s something I think I could get better at. As I alluded to in the Note, I think this piece about a muse would resonant with us Substack creative types, so I urge you to read it.

It seems others have already caught on to Evelyn and I’m slightly late to the party. I revisited their page and read some of their non-fiction stuff and was at the very least entertained, so venture there as well!

I read one of Emil’s autopsies of Zachary Clark’s work and so I was familiar with them and excited to see them in Midnight Vault. This story is representative of how you can level up with the help of a good editor. I remember being scared when I read this story, but more so feeling that sense of dread you get working a mundane job and looking at the clock again and again until your shift it up.

I checked out Zachary’s page and found his most recent post a lovely sort of autofiction (creative nonficiton? pure fiction?) about Christmas Eve, sweet and slice-of-life in a way you might find in a Clancy Steadwell piece, so you know what to do.

Another A.I. theme here—it’s interesting to think about all the sci-fi that has come to pass (Jules Verne’s submarine) and that hasn’t (ubiquitous hovercars), then consider how often A.I. has come up as theme in sci-fi of the past and how similar/different it has been compared to what was imagined. I thought Evan Miller did a wonderful job here of getting inside ‘the head’ of A.I. It definitely resembles what we know about their intelligence in that it’s actually a sort of ‘text completion’ rather than smarts, and it was interesting how Evan’s machines converse with question and answer style that is adjacent to prompting.

I’ve since read more from Evan, including this short story I called ‘Salinger-esque’—I think we are somewhat kindred spirits. Be sure to check them out if you like my whole thing (whatever it is).

I say here, back to the Gaby Brogan well again because there is always more. Gaby has such an abundance of great little sci-fi stories on her stack. She is great at writing those tight sort of Black Mirror type stories—but better. In a sort of Andy Futuro vein.

I think Gaby is a really good example of someone proving that if you just keep posting quality fiction time after time in a consistent quality, the readers will come.

Obviously, this was not a Midnight Vault story. But I wanted to include her here because I think she fits their oeuvre very well. Maybe she’ll be a part of it next time!

Obligatory ‘I wrote a novel’ plug—you can either buy it here for straight-up $20 OR preferably become a paid annual subscriber for $30 here and I’ll send you a code to get it for free at checkout. Look at this beauty! The writing inside is okay too. Lots of people saying this. Thank you.

That’s a wrap on vol. 11! I’ll leave you with this: