#4 — a spider weaves, weaves

Author

Hache Pueyo
April 30, 2024

Hello, and welcome back.

This week, my story RABBIT’S FOOT will be reprinted by The Dark Magazine, along with other original and reprint horror pieces. This short story was originally published in my bilingual collection A STUDY IN UGLINESS & OUTRAS HISTÓRIAS, and it’s about a young woman with facial blindness who is rescued after a car crash by a couple who seems eerily familiar, even though she can’t tell why. If you enjoy horror and dark fiction, keep tuned out for their next issue, and support the magazine if you can.

Also an update on my upcoming novella BUT NOT TOO BOLD: it will be a hardcover! You can already preorder on the link above or here.

See you next month!

Hache 🕷️

Vita Nostra 🇺🇦

(Marina & Sergey Dyachenko, 2007, trans. Julia Meitov Hersey)

Everything changes for Sasha Samokhina in the summer where she meets the evasive and threatening Farit, a strange man that forces her to partake in bizarre activities that cause her to vomit golden coins. From then on, Sasha finds herself trapped by his rules and forced to leave her mother and her ideas of a future behind, and move to the remote village of Torpa to join the Institute of Special Technologies. It quickly becomes clear that none of the students came willingly, and none of them understand what are the “special technologies” they’re supposed to master, but failing to do so—and failing to embrace the transformations that come with knowledge—can have irreparable consequences.

Vita Nostra is peculiar, bizarre and extremely charming. It’s as feverish as it is grounded in reality. It’s metaphysical. It refuses to take any expected route. I knew nothing about it when I found it in a bookshop, and now I have to live with the frustration that I don’t know Russian and can’t read the rest of the Dyachenkos’ bibliography, but here’s to hoping we will have more translations of their work soon. Unfortunately, Sergey passed away in 2022, but if you like Vita Nostra, you can read the sequel, Assassin of Reality, or Prompt, the short novella the couple wrote for The Digital Aesthete anthology.