TBR Dark: 5/2025

TBR Dark is a curated anthology of fiction that peers into the uncanny, the speculative, and the psychologically charged. Conceived as an appendix to The Brussels Review, this volume gathers authors whose work resists boundaries-stories that explore altered consciousness, post-human dilemmas, technological intrusions, existential dread, and the fragile architectures of memory and belief. These are not simply genre tales; they are literary incursions into the unstable territories where identity, morality, and perception begin to unravel.

At the heart of this collection is a concern with transformation-not just of bodies, societies, or technologies, but of thought itself. In Christopher Miguel Flakus's "A True Good Man," a man's fear of mechanized medicine leads him to a confrontation with prejudice, vulnerability, and the last remnants of a fading war between humans and sentient machines. The story challenges notions of trust, repair, and inter-species inheritance, asking whether memory or function defines a person-or a machine.

Ed Meek's "Doggie.com" shifts the narrative to the domestic realm, where a robotic pet becomes more companion than tool, more confidant than product. What begins as satire becomes unsettlingly intimate, raising questions about attachment, autonomy, and the slow blurring of boundaries between affection and programming. It is a story that holds up a mirror not to the future, but to our present tendency to outsource intimacy.

"Retro Racers" by Mord McGhee takes the reader into the adrenaline-soaked world of AI-manipulated racing, where a washed-up human driver contends with the commodification of talent and the erasure of agency. Speed becomes a metaphor for obsolescence and resistance, and in its wake lies a deeper commentary on what is retained when machines outperform the bodies that built them.

Time fractures in Camellia Paul's "Pearls of the Planets," where a teenager on the beaches of Puri, India, touches something that shouldn't exist-a floating celestial body-and is pulled backward into their own pre-existence. This speculative reverie folds memory, heritage, and time-travel into an atmospheric narrative of awe and reconciliation, where personal mythologies bend the laws of physics.

In "Rubicon" by Nathan Poole Shannon, a space station on the edge of collapse becomes the site of impossible choices. Life support dwindles, evacuation is partial, and a mother must decide who survives. Told with eerie calm and escalating dread, it is a meditation on sacrifice, hallucination, and maternal devotion in the face of cosmic indifference.

Elsewhere in the volume, readers will find Dionyssios Kalamvrezos's surreal childhood mystery "The Blue Dice," where media, memory, and imagination collide; Alexis Ames's haunting parable "Fortunate One," examining the metaphysical residue of human trauma; and tales from A.D. Capili, Edward St Boniface, Jake Stein, Mark Connelly, and others, each contributing a distinct note to the dissonant symphony of TBR Dark.

What binds these stories is not their setting or genre but their willingness to traverse uncertainty. Whether through alien technologies, sentient algorithms, or dreamlike recursions of the past, each piece asks what it means to be human in environments that resist human comprehension. The horror is not in monsters but in perception stretched to its limit. The science is not speculative but diagnostic.

TBR Dark is for readers who crave fiction that disturbs gently, questions persistently, and lingers like a low frequency heard in the bones. It is a book not about darkness as a theme, but as a condition of knowledge-what we cannot fully illuminate, what we choose not to see, and what watches back from the void.