Varieties of The Fantastic in Fiction

The two characters, a man and a woman, are sailing on a boat looking for food. The sea has rising to the cities and now it seems that everything is under water or almost under water. The lobsters are found with their bodies upside down, dead in the white water. They don’t know how long […]

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Julia Armfield’s “Salt Slow” was an interesting read. What caught my attention the most of the reading was the allegory which seems to stem from religious ideologies. This story in particular made me think of Noah’s Ark, in the sense that during a disaster a male and female of every species is put into the ark to […]

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The first thing that caught my attention in “salt slow” was the inclusion of two characters of opposite gender and the fact that they seemed to be on a journey away from somewhere comfortable. When Armfield wrote, “takes up his apple knife,” I was sure that they were a new take on the story of […]

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“Cassandra After” follows the Main Character and dead girlfriend,Cassandra, that has come back to life. When Cassandra visits she decomposing but in tact. Throughout the story we see that the MC doesn’t usually date women and because of her religion isn’t very open about her sexuality but she deeply loves Cassandra. While we don’t know […]

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“It was strange, now, to be able to look right through her in places – the deep places in her throat and ribcage where the skin had worn away to reveal her dark interiors, the opened hollows of her chest. I had always imagined her soul like a stitch in fabric, metallic thread in wool. Looking […]

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For the stories we had to read for today’s class, I got the feeling from both of them that they were the accounts of people who were trying to get over a relationship gone wrong. In “Smack,” the narrator is struggling to move on after her divorce; driven largely by hurt and anger, she locks […]

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“Smack” was a seemingly normal story by Julia Armfield that follows a woman going through a divorce. It is narrated in third person, using a very descriptive and seemingly indifferent tone. There is nothing specifically fantastic about this story, at least in any way that it jumps out to the reader. However, the fast appearance of […]

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The story “Cassandra After” challenges readers to consider the process of grieving, as well as the relationship with those that are being grieved. The narrator includes anecdotes of traditional grieving processes and etiquette contained within the Catholic church, precisely laid out rules and expectations. A step-by-step to grief. This is juxtaposed by description of the […]

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“Smack” by Julia Armfield was an interesting short story about a women that in an act of defiance during a divorce locks herself up in her ex-husbands beach house. However, to this point I am still unaware of the fantastical element of the story, as every event in the story did not seem to be […]

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“Difficult At Parties” was a very interesting story to read. The story focuses on the narrator who is very isolated from other people. There is a man named Paul who is often with her, but the narrator still seems very closed off from other people or inviting other people in. It gives me the impression […]

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The point of view is first person, and the narrator is telling the story by looking back at her memories. When the story uses first person, it puts me into the story as I am reading so I am the one that is experiencing everything in the story. It takes place at Devil’s Throat, which […]

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Honestly, “Difficult at Parties” was one of the harder short stories I’ve read. It’s not a surprise that in writing about the female experience, Machado would end up writing about something at least 1 in 5 women have experienced. It’s a story that you just have to sit with for a while. Though it is […]

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