Preston Lang is a native New Yorker and a product of its public schools. He’s published four crime novels so far.
• This story was written specifically for an anthology to honor the terrific journalist and crime writer William E. Wallace, so it seemed appropriate to focus on a struggling reporter getting into trouble. I realize now that in the first sentence, I boldly called out the hitman subgenre as unrealistic but then went on to write something much less believable than the average assassin story. It was fun to write.
Jared Lipof’s short fiction appears in The Los Angeles Review, The Emerson Review, and Salamander. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina, where he’s at work on a novel.
• Rendering an actual human being in fictional form can be tricky. Even more so when it’s family. Relatives will read your work and say the events in the fiction did not occur exactly as described. They’ll remind you how it really went down, as if that was even the point. But when you use your recently deceased father as a template for a character, whatever pressure is relieved by his inability to give you notes is offset by the fact that you really wish he could read it. At which point you realize you were just trying to perform a magic trick. “He’s not dead if he’s in the story,” you tell yourself. And even though you’re wrong, it was worth a try. Special thanks to Jennifer Barber at Salamander, whose editorial instincts brought out the best possible version of this story.
Anne Therese Macdonald is the author of the novel A Short Time in Luxembourg. Her short stories have been published in various journals and anthologies, including Blue Earth Review, Belletriste, Dublin Quarterly, Matter: A Journal of Art and Literature, Words on the Waves, and most recently the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers’ anthology False Faces: Twenty-Six Stories About the Masks We Wear.
• “That Donnelly Crowd” evolved from a culmination of several events in my life, especially the years I hitchhiked through Ireland during the Troubles and my return during the Celtic Tiger. In the story, a young American woman is attracted to Joe Donnelly, a man caught between these two eras. He is from a family of terrorists but claims that he’s in Ireland to build a modern factory. Against this, I explore the tendency of Americans to cling to the fantasy of an ancestral Ireland over the reality of today’s modern country. Colleen, the American woman, is a troubled soul. Like so many of us, she succumbs to her own fantasy. She sees in Joe Donnelly what she wants to see, unencumbered by the reality before her, ignoring the little signs that tell her to run the other way.
Mark Mayer has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. From 2012 to 2014 he lived at Cornell College’s Center for the Literary Arts as the Robert P. Dana Emerging Writer. His first book, Aerialists, won the Michener-Copernicus Prize. He lives in Paris with his wife and two rabbits.
• I wrote “The Clown” immediately after Trump was elected president. Many new stories justifying the Trump voter were suddenly in circulation, and I was feeling fretful about how fiction writers are told to create empathy for ill-doing characters by presenting their inner lives and stories — by making the evils they commit products of situation and circumstance. I was asking myself whether literary fiction always absolves its criminals and whether there was a limiting case. The story is part of my collection Aerialists (2019), in which every story reimagines and reinvents one of the acts or characters of the circus.
Rebecca McKanna is the recipient of Third Coast’s 2018 Fiction Prize. Her writing has appeared in Colorado Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Joyland, and other journals and was published as one of Narrative’s Stories of the Week. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Indianapolis. She lives in Indiana, where she is finishing her debut novel about a young woman uncovering the dark truth about her mother’s childhood. Visit her at rebeccamckanna.com.
• When I grew up in Iowa, Grant Wood’s American Gothic was everywhere. Despite or maybe because of its ubiquity, it wasn’t until my mid-twenties when I started thinking about what the painting said about midwestern life. Around this time, I was writing a series of stories about different women who had been impacted by the same serial killer. When I was back in Iowa visiting my parents for Christmas that year, my mother and I drove to Eldon to see the American Gothic House and Center. I was startled by how small the iconic house seemed in person. As we walked through the museum, I imagined an employee receiving a letter from the serial killer, and the story took shape from there.
I’m indebted to the editors at Colorado Review for originally publishing this story, especially Stephanie G’Schwind and Steven Schwartz. Thank you to Otto Penzler and Jonathan Lethem for giving it a home here.
Jennifer McMahon is the New York Times best-selling author of nine suspense novels, including Promise Not to Tell, The Winter People, and The Invited. She lives in Vermont with her partner, Drea, and their daughter, Zella.
• I was on vacation with my family a couple of years ago, doing lovely touristy things during the day. But one night I had a terrible, vivid dream.
I dreamt that I was a twelve-year-old girl, an outsider, the one others teased, and they were playing a wicked sort of trick on me. A whole series of tricks that ended in fire and death. I was wearing an absurd costume they’d dressed me in. I was Hannah-beast.
But then, the dream shifted — I wasn’t the victim, I was one of the girls playing the trick, laughing at poor, stupid Hannah, thrilling at how clever my friends and I were. Knowing it was wrong, but going along for the ride anyway, telling myself it was just a joke.
The dream stuck with me throughout our pleasant family vacation, and it was obvious why — in real life, hadn’t I been both girls at one time or another?
I’m a big believer in ghosts but sometimes what I find most frightening are the ghosts of my own past. The things that haunt me most are the choices I’ve made. Like Amanda, they’re the things that have me looking over my shoulder, jumping at shadows, sure I hear some long-ago voice taunting, teasing:
Say boo.
Joyce Carol Oates has long been fascinated by the phenomenon of “mystery” — in art, as in life. She is the author of a number of works of psychological suspense fiction including the novels Beasts, A Fair Maiden, Jack of Spades, and Rape: A Love Story (recently adapted for the screen as Vengeance: A Love Story, starring Nicolas Cage, arguably the worst film adaptation ever made in the history of American cinema, though film aficionados might wish to quarrel with this), and the story collections The Female of the Species, The Doll Master, Dis Mem Ber, and Night-Gaunts. In 2018 she was awarded the LA Times Book Prize in the Mystery/Thriller category for her novel A Book of American Martyrs and in 2019 she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for her lifetime achievement in literature. She has been a member, since 1978, of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 2018 was inducted into the American Philosophical Society.
• “The Archivist” is an adaptation of a section of my novel My Life as a Rat, which had its genesis in a short story titled “Curly Red,” originally published in Harper’s, in a very different form. In the short story, I was exploring the commingled guilt and hurt of a young woman who had been exiled from her family, for having (reluctantly) informed upon her older brothers, who’d participated in a hate crime; in the novel, I am exploring the psychology of exile, the assimilation of guilt by the victim who, if she is victimized again, as in the story “The Archivist,” will not defend herself but accept further punishment as deserved, and will not inform upon her abuser. It is often wondered why victims of sexual abuse don’t report their abusers, and in “The Archivist” it is clear to us that the teenage girl-victim identifies more definitively with her abuser than with those adults who might wish to help her — because she considers herself guilty, deserving of punishment. But “The Archivist” is also an exploration of the culture that averts its eyes from abuse, in this case shielding a flagrant bully/abuser who happens to be a high school math teacher of quasi-popular status.