-
Dateline Plot Twists
Fiction by Benjamin Drevlow It was the husband, no, it was the boyfriend, the babydaddy, the ex, the elicit Tinder lover, the hitman one of them hired. No, it was the colleague, the boss, the custodian, the mouth-breathing, pee-smelling tech guy. Probably it was the pimp, it’s always the pimp, no, the drug dealer, the…
-
After the Nashville Shooting
An Essay by Emry Trantham I. It’s 2009. I am twenty-three. My husband will be turning twenty-four at the end of the week, and I’ve been working for the last month to get him the perfect gift. It’s his first birthday as a dad. I want to get him a handgun. He can use it…
-
The Nitty Gritty
Interview with Tucker Leighty-Phillips By Charlotte Hamrick Although Twitter is getting lots of shade thrown at it lately, I still enjoy the fact that I can find new-to-me writers on it. I have my favorite widely-published writers, as everyone does, but there’s a special thrill when I read work by someone I’ve never read and…
-
The Color of Bones
Fiction by Paul J. Garth Night I drove back, somewhere around Wichita, when the sun was falling off to the west, I realized I’d forgotten what my father’s face looked like. It’d been seven years since I’d last seen him, and aside from his phone call a few nights before, and the times I heard…
-
Worse Than Black and White
An Analysis of Racism and Double-Consciousness in Dorothy B. Hughes’ The Expendable Man By Wiley Reiver N.B.: This essay inaugurates an occasional series at Reckon Review in which we dive deeply into crime or noir works of note. One of the least useful, or even interesting, debates in contemporary literary criticism concerns whether a fiction…
-
Flexing My Creative Muscles: Video Game Edition
By Melissa Llanes Brownlee I am not a gamer. Not really. But I do play video games during my free time. And when I say video games, I mean those Triple A, holy crap, they are shooting at me, and I have to also manage my resources, and why am I doing this to myself,…
-
Hear What We Want
Fiction by Jason Graff The Alley It wasn’t a garbage truck. Dad would show down against anything else: cars, SUVs, other pickups too. Beeping and cursing until they pulled into the nearest driveway or better yet, backed completely out into the street. The engine growled the whole time. He’d complain to the air afterwards about…
-
To Live Outside the Law, You Must be Honest
A Review of Chris Offutt’s Code of the Hills By Maud Lavin Chris Offutt’s latest novel Code of the Hills (Grove Atlantic, June 2023) is Kentucky noir, with a twist. Or two or three. Offutt delivers a dirty, dangerous, suspenseful, page-turning tale that takes us from the vengeful Kentucky hill country to the gun-ridden streets…
-
The Artful Academic: Writing Unspeakable Moments
By Brandy Renee McCann Dissociation is a common experience among those of us who’ve experienced trauma. We’ve all experienced mild out-of-body experiences where we lose touch with the present moment—for example, zoning out during a conversation or binging on a TV series to get respite from a stressful period. Even intensely positive experiences can lead…