My Friends Who Are Not My Friends: Stories

My Friends Who Are Not My Friends is a collection of nine short stories in which a crisis of generic convention has occurred. In pulling from horror, science fiction, the speculative, and fantasy, these stories seek to infiltrate and disarm what would otherwise be a plain-spoken realism to consider the boundaries of generic construction when it serves the banal. What happens when we make the mistake of wishing to step into a pre-existing form? What happens when we wish for our own world to collide with the patterned arrangements of genre? What does it mean for a banal existence to collide with horror? With dystopia? With a desire to be a heroine fighting supernatural demons at the brink of a Hellmouth? Within the collection, the answer is a type of organized chaos; vaguely Freudian manifestations of characters' experiences and fears that cause the stories themselves to exist on shaky, uncomfortable footing. The space of this project is one in which repression and redaction leads to a literal exorcism, passivity finds houses and people shifting until they are pushed to brink of action, a break-up invites a multiplicity of hauntings, a conflicted wife guides her sex addicted double through sex with her husband. All this from a very simple truth of readership: we all want, in some way, to see something of ourselves reflected on the page and we are often disappointed - in ourselves or in the text - when we do.