Books Short Fiction Spotlight Must Read Short Speculative Fiction: August 2025 By Alex Brown | Published on September 17, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share As someone who works in a school in Southern California, August and September are chaotic months with too much to do competing with weeks of baking heat and an overwhelming desire to be back on summer vacation. I usually set aside a couple hours every week to indulge in short speculative fiction, and let me tell you, after the month I just had, these moments were an emotional refuge. Here are the ten science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories that kept me going in August. “The Barrens” by Octavia Cade I know, I know, this is from July, but I missed it when it first came out. There are a couple others from the summer on this list that were just too good to skip. “The Barrens” is about an epidemic of people growing sea urchins in their eyes until they pop out of their head and die. The narrator is, unexpectedly, kind of into it. It’s pretty gross, if you’re like me and get really uncomfortable with eyeball-related horror, but it was also interesting from a scientific standpoint. Here in California, our kelp forests have been gutted by sea urchins, which in turn is collapsing whole marine ecosystems. I didn’t know New Zealand was dealing with the same issue with the creatures they call kina—different echinoderms (strongylocentrotus purpuratus vs evechinus chloroticus), same problem. (Three-Lobed Burning Eye—July 2025; issue 25) “Bunny Ears” by Kristina Ten Thirteen-year-old Hannah is packed off to Colden Hills Music Camp, a summer camp that seems to have neither hills nor music. She’s not unpopular enough to be bullied or interesting enough to be included in friend group activities, so she’s ignored by campers and counselors alike. Then she hears an urban legend about former campers who were abandoned by their parents and started sewing things onto their scalps to imitate bunny ears (for those who don’t know, bunny ears is when you make a peace sign with your fingers and prank someone by putting them up behind their head in a photo to make it look like they have bunny ears). That’s when Kristina Ten takes a sharp turn. Real Lord of the Flies vibes with this one. I guess there’s a reason it was published in a horror magazine. (Nightmare—August 2025; issue 155) “Carmilla, or, the Making of a Girl” by Divya Kernan Divya Kernan refashions the part of Bram Stoker’s Dracula where the world’s most famous vampire sails across the Atlantic with his grave dirt and gradually eats everyone on the ship into a tale of queer longing. The protagonist isn’t Drac but a teen girl with an all-consuming hunger. Her appetite is not just for food but flesh as well, and there is plenty of both on this ship. Hollywood directors, take note: if you’re going to take a work of classic literature and turn it into an erotic thriller, this is how you do it. (Baffling—July 2025; issue 22) “Finer than Silk, Brighter than Snow” by Shveta Thakrar On the banks of the Sarasvati River, an old laundress labors over the clothes of the wealthy. One day while trying to stave off the boredom that comes from doing a job you hate, she encounters a talking snake. It offers her legends and poetry in exchange for never asking it any personal questions, but her curiosity gets the better of her. As much as this is a story about stories, it’s also about cultural appropriation and the theft of culture by those whose only interest is exploitation. (Uncanny—July/August 2025; issue 65) “The Hungry Mouth at the Edge of Space and the Goddess Knitting at Home” by Renan Bernardo The crew of the spaceship the Sopinha de Feijão are dead, and the captain isn’t happy about it. Adelaide is trapped on the ship, a ghost haunting an empty vessel. She floats past the corpses of her friends; if they are also en-spirited, she cannot see them. It’s just her, alone and dead, in space. She spends her time thinking about Vovó, her only family, and remembering how they sold bananas at the street market. A stunning, beautiful exploration of life and death, complemented by a gorgeous illustration by Alix Pentecost Farren. (Reactor—August 27, 2025) “The Night Market” by Erin Brown Speaking of markets. Our narrator is a vendor at the Night Market. The only vendor. She only has one thing to sell—a single, perfectly ripe pear—and only one customer, a creature known only as “She” or “Her.” That’s all I’m going to tell you because you need to experience the unfolding horror yourself. Erin Brown’s story about a person stuck in an endless cycle of torment is compelling not just for the plot or characters but for the way it’s written. She plays with capitalization, italics, and sentence structure, often ending paragraphs in the middle of sentences. It ramps up the tension so that by the time I hit the reveal, I was on the edge of my seat and biting my thumbnail. (Skull & Laurel—July 2025; issue 4) “Postman, Soldier, Traitor” by Vijayalaxmi Samal Akshar begins this story as a soldier fighting in a war he doesn’t understand the point of. It’s not his job to. His only task is walking through battlefields after the fighting has ended, killing enemy soldiers unlucky enough to not have succumbed to their wounds yet. One enemy curses him with a letter, and then he becomes a traitor. Compelled by the curse and memories of his father as a postman, he sets off on a long journey to deliver the letter to the boy’s family, and thus he makes his next transformation: to postman. The question is, who will he become once the letter has been delivered? A contemplative story, one that doesn’t let its protagonist slide past the consequences of his actions. (Beneath Ceaseless Skies—August 21, 2025; issue 439) “The Shift Room” by Mary Wanjiru Alan works in an office building when one evening he’s sent to a room that doesn’t exist. The shift room “was wedged between the custodial closet and the stairs, with a plain gray door that had never stayed open long enough.” It is a room that changes all who enter. In it is a recliner, a clock, and a mirror. The things he sees in that mirror…well, you need to read the story to find out. You’ll be changed by the shift room, too. The story left me feeling unmoored and with goosebumps prickling my skin. (Inner Worlds—August 2025; issue 8.1) “They Must Be Angels” by Elle Zi Dong Keira and Annie are up-and-coming models. Modeling is a cutthroat industry that often demands its participants do impossible, painful things to their bodies, something Keira knows first hand. As her friend Annie gets gig after prestigious gig while she’s relegated to commercial shoots, her jealousy grows. “If there’s one thing my mother taught me, it’s to take responsibility for my actions.” You are not prepared for the way Keira Tan internalizes that message. (The Dark—August 2025; issue 123) “Welcome to Spruceway” by Brianne Battye Set in the aftermath of the zombie apocalypse, Brianne Battye structured this piece like an audio recording. The narrator is taking the listener on a tour of the Spruceway Mall where a community of survivors are holed up. We learn a little about the outside world, the narrator’s personal life, and what befalls some of the residents of the mall. It’s a sad yet charming story, full of humanity. It features people who don’t usually star in zombie stories, the regular people who aren’t running death cults or treating the world like their own personal Mad Max. (Augur—August 2025; issue 8.1) [end-mark] The post Must Read Short Speculative Fiction: August 2025 appeared first on Reactor.