Our mission at Psychopomp is to bring you the best fiction about death, multiverses, and more. In pursuit of that goal, we are pleased to present our next three novelettes, coming this fall, and next spring and summer.
The stories will be free to read on Psychopomp.com, and email subscribers will receive ebook versions (pdf/epub). Psychopomp will publish an omnibus of all the novelettes in print and ebook as well.
Sign up here (free!) to get on the email list and get a copy of these stories—you’ll also get our weekly Letters From The Psychopomp deathy email:
We Who Will Not Die, by Shingai Njeri Kagunda
About the Story:
Nima and Tuni share everything. Theirs is a lovely world, where people were once animals, and carry these traits forward into their human lives. But Nima beieves she was something else—a star that exploded, a nova. The arrival of aliens on their world will change everything the girls know, but not quite everything they believe.
About the Author
Shingai Njeri Kagunda is an Afrosurreal/futurist storyteller from Nairobi, Kenya with a Literary Arts MFA from Brown. Shingai’s work has been featured in the Best American Sci-fi and Fantasy 2020, Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction 2021, and Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2020. They have fiction, essays, and poetry in, or upcoming in Omenana, FANTASY magazine, FracturedLit, Khoreo, Africa Risen, Baffling Magazine, LIGHTSPEED and Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction, among others. Shingai’s debut novella & This is How to Stay Alive published by Neon Hemlock Press in October 2021 won the Ignyte Award for best novella in 2022. She is the co-editor of Podcastle Magazine and the co-founder of Voodoonauts (an Afrofuturist summer workshop nominated for a community Ignyte Award). Shingai is a creative writing teacher, an eternal student, and a lover of all things soft and Black.
UPDATE: The Buildings Are Hungry and the Plague Can Speak, by Natalia Theodoridou
About the story:
I have been thinking a lot about games lately (okay, maybe more than lately) and the way they can inflect our realities, which got me thinking about the games we play with each other and with ourselves, what it means to live in a world where work has been gamified, suffering has been gamified, where one can take the idea of escape and turn it into another sort of trap. What would it take for us to disrupt our way of being, and could technology ever really do that within the parameters of capitalist consumption? I don’t have answers, of course; but I sure have a story for us to chew on.
About the Author:
Natalia Theodoridou has published over a hundred short stories, most of them dark and queer, in magazines such as Strange Horizons, Uncanny, Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Nightmare, and F&SF, among others. He won the 2018 World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction and has been a finalist for the Nebula Award in the Novelette and Game Writing categories. Natalia holds a PhD in Media and Cultural Studies from SOAS, University of London, and is a Clarion West and Tin House Writers’ Workshop graduate. He was born in Greece and has roots in Georgia, Russia, and Turkey. His debut novel, Sour Cherry, is coming in April 2025. Find out more at www.natalia-theodoridou.com.
Garden of the Bloodpotter, by Erin Brown
About the Story:
The blighted little town of Fauen never meant to attract the attention of a necromancer. But ever since the day the child Hen led the Bloodpotter through the gates, life got better for every citizen. The sorcerer could heal the sick, cleanse the streams, and increase the bounty of the harvest. He could make life so sweet that the Fauens could forget the horrors of the perpetual King’s War, far away and full of bloodshed and rotten magic. At least…until the war arrived in the form of his lost beloved, a brutal and captivating HighSoldier.
About the Author:
Erin Brown is a poet and author of horror, fabulism, and fantasy short fiction. She has been published in FIYAH Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, The Deadlands, Escape Pod, Midnight and Indigo, and other publications, with upcoming work in several periodicals and anthologies throughout 2024-2025. Erin received a Pushcart nomination in 2021, a Truman Capote Literary Trust Scholarship in Creative Writing for Spring 2022, and was shortlisted for Brave New Weird 2022. When not writing, she can usually be found listening to Lo-Fi and sipping date shakes on the bone-shard shores of Salton Sea. Twitter: @babblebrown. BlueSky: @babblewocky.bsky.social. Website www.ebrownwrites.com.
