Something’s Not Right: a review

Many of the pieces in yves.’s short fiction collection Something’s Not Right (2023, tRaum Books) could qualify as what Diana Callahan has called curio fiction: stories which “place the fantastic alongside the mundane” within “a world very much like our own, except one thing is slightly… off.” yves.’s stories are brief, sometimes radically brief, and they deposit you directly into scenarios where the magical blends in to the humdrum, leaving you (just a few paragraphs later) imbued with a mood of unease, or sombreness, or amusement, or half-smiling hope.

yves. is gently playful with the genre conventions they toy with: horror, fantasy, the occult. We encounter fae folk, goblins, augurs, vampires, witches and the like. Sometimes these brushes against magic disquiet the reader (as magic should); other times the magic is part of the ordinary, and the emotion and charm of the work emerges in how it humanises the extramundane by pairing it with the struggle to make ends meet, the helplessness to resist our drab modern systems, or the tongue-stuck-to-roof-of-mouth hopeful anxiety of seeking to leap the gap so as to know and be known by another person.

There is a focus (albeit not exclusive) on youth, on the beginnings of relationships: a number of stories resolve into charming scenes of young queer infatuation, attraction, and new love. These pieces are “queer” both in…