Dangling

Dangling by Maura Yzmore is a collection of dark short fiction, featuring twenty-eight stories about people on the precipice. The collection straddles absurdism, literary realism, and horror, with a dash of the speculative.

Content warning: Characters in Dangling deal with difficult themes, including addiction, infidelity, suicide, sexual assault, murder, cannibalism, and animal cruelty.

From Anxiety Press:

“Yzmore's Dangling is a visceral collection of stories told so uniquely and so powerfully it will be a long time before we see a debut voice with more promise."

— Sheldon Lee Compton, author of Oblivion Angels

“Dangling dwells in the liminal space between the sacred and the profane, that uncanny threshold between craving and transcendence. Yzmore deftly captures pivotal moments of transgression, by turns quiet and frenzied, through lived-in characters who are primal, flawed, and profoundly human.”

— Josh Goller, editor of The Molotov Cocktail

“Dangling from Maura Yzmore is occasionally shocking, utterly compelling, but above all, it showcases her absolute mastery of flash fiction. She wields stories under a thousand words with scalpel-like precision, and each tale of the surreal, the strange, and the speculative cuts clean to the bone.”

— Aeryn Rudel, author of Effectively Wild and Night Walk and Other Dark Paths

“In these razor-edge tales of strange hunger, characters chase what they crave most—only to find it’s never quite what they imagined. These bite-size stories pull readers into moments of unsettling clarity—when desire meets its object and everything shifts. Dangling explores the inner demons and angels that drive us, the things we’re willing to become, and the precise instant when we understand what we’ve really been searching for all along. Tight, immersive, and gloriously weird—flash fiction that burrows under your skin and stays there.”

— Myna Chang, author of The Potential of Radio and Rain

“Every story in Dangling hits you like a magic trick and like a magic trick leaves you with your mouth open. There’s gritty realism here, there’s magical realism here and there’s Yzmore’s razor-sharp dissection of humanity in every punch line—even when that punchline hits too close to home to laugh."

— Benjamin Drevlow, editor-in-chief of BULL

“At turns raunchy, comic, surreal, romantic, and horrific, the brief tales in Dangling depict lives struggling for connection in a world full of hostile surprises. A box of addictive and demented literary bon-bons.”

— Graham Robert Scott, author of “Missile Command” and “Amundsen Sea”