Dystopian Short Stories

Consider this a warning dear reader. Most of these stories are not for the faint of heart. While many of them are not horror stories in the traditional sense, some contain horrible and often remarkable things. Many of them are full of dark scenes and evil deeds. Some are full of wonder and even humor. There are many different spaces inside these covers to travel, but few are completely safe. Try not to dwell too long in the darker places here.

Visiting the galaxy's only Cageless Zoo should be a special treat for Melandre and her children. Except she's still trying to reckon with her husband's recent death and how she's going to raise two highly independent children on her own. As their visit quickly falls to chaos, Melandre learns that family is the only thing left she has to rely on.

Kate Enrite lives in the near future where a person's influence score determines what society offers. These influence scores have pervaded social structures to the point that privacy has been outlawed as a hindrance to influence measurement. With nothing to gain from her true identity or lose as a fake, Kate fights to secure what she perceives as a better life. In the process, she will discover how long a person can pretend to be someone they are not before becoming the pretense.

The story of The Scarlet Plague takes place in 2073 in the San Francisco area, 60 years after an apocalyptic pandemic called the Red Death or Scarlet Plague has depopulated the Earth. James Smith, one of the survivors, lives with his grandsons who are hunter-gatherers in a tribal world. He relates the horror of the plague to them, and tells them of the time when he was a professor of English, and of the start of the pandemic. His grandsons, who are of limited cognitive ability, refuse to believe him; they cannot believe that the disease was spread by germs.

It is known as The Descent. The event that brought on the fall of humanity and unleashed the violent, hungry Freaks upon the world. The mysterious pirate radio voice Doctor Midnite has called for the Regulars - the humans - who are left to "Take it back." Jonathan "Pops" Poplovitch and his team of "Exterminators" answered the call and attempted to take down the nefarious Admiral Shen, who'd set up shop in Columbus, Ohio. They failed.

This original short story asks the question, "If eternal life came at the expense of love, would you choose death?"

New from the author of The Story of My Face, Paradise & Elsewhere is a collection of dark fables at once familiar and entirely strange: Join the Orange Prize-nominated Kathy Page as she notches a new path through the wild, lush, half-fantastic and half-real terrain of fairy tale and myth.