If you like short stories, like speculative fiction, and like stories that make you think and chew on them, I highly recommend checking this one out.

Every Galaxy a Circle by Chloe N. Clark is a collection of short stories that range in genre including sci-fi, horror, fantasy, and some that have a slippery, dream-like kind of fantastical quality that puts me in mind of magical realism. (I’ll elaborate on this.) Some of them take place in space, involving a failing ship or an alien life-form. Others take place in a café that bakes pies for the dead, or a neighborhood with a system of caves that people can get lost in, or a condominium where something is eerily wrong—where the residents are just a little off.

I enjoyed the variety, and sometimes, which ones wound up being my favorites surprised me. I loved one of the horror stories in particular, and quite liked another one that turned out kinder than I expected. I don’t usually think of myself as a horror person, but maybe what I can’t do is horror in large, protracted doses, or horror that despairs. Maybe, actually, I like certain flavors of horror—horror that is faced and handled in a clever way, or quietly haunts me, or gets turned on its head into kindness and hope. Which, by the way, are all things at least one of the stories in this collection did.

Across all the genres, the short stories delve deep into the main character’s interior landscape, and they contain a complex and nuanced mix of sweetness, wistfulness, and haunting. They often contained grief and loss, people who were missing loved ones or who were facing death (or the risk of it) themselves, but they weren’t grim or depressing. These are definitely more internal-experience-focused, less action-y stories, not that action never happens… and I really liked that, too!

Circling back to magical realism: for the purposes of my understanding and discussion here, and for those who are unfamiliar with the genre, a magical realism story takes place in our world or a world like it (a “realistic” world) but contains strange, fantastical elements that defy explanation. Think of Allende’s novels, or Gabriel García Marquez. Fantasy, in contrast, creates new worlds operating under different rules. The magic in fantasy stories is a known, integral part of how the setting works. There’s a logic to how it works, and it can be studied and understood—even if the characters don’t know everything about that logic, and even if the story itself doesn’t get too far into the nitty gritty of the logic or make it highly detailed or mathematical. Think Avatar: The Last Airbender, or the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan, or Sarah Beth Durst’s The Spellshop.

I am, at my core, a logic-loving fantasy and sci-fi writer. Both the world I live in and the worlds I imagine are understandable, reducible into theorems and laws and systems. If a mystery exists, so does an underlying answer to the mystery, concrete and definitive. The boundary between fantasy magic and science fiction is thin and blurry. And when I was younger and first encountered magical realism, it kind of broke my brain. I did not know how to recognize or analyze it, because it was so antithetical to my typical mode of thought. I didn’t like that.

I have a greater appreciation for it now. And so, I was able to appreciate the way a few of these stories played with my understanding of what was happening, made me doubt what was real within their bounds. When something fantastical happens in Chloe’s magical realism-ish stories—or magical realism stories more broadly—if it can’t be understood logically, it can be understood emotionally. It’s hooking into the emotional core of the story and can be analyzed through an emotional lens, even if how or why it’s happening mechanically isn’t concrete.

Not all of the fantastical stories were mysterious or disorienting, to be clear. In one story, ghosts show up for pie, and it’s an understood and well-established, this-is-just-how-it-works thing. In another, it wasn’t known exactly how the alien life-forms influenced the characters’ psychology, but there seemed to be some kind of mechanism that could be eventually understood. Again, the mixture is refreshing.

I did struggle with the nonlinear storytelling in the last story. I think its intention was to unravel an emotional arc for the reader without being confined to the linear timeline, and to mimic the weird nature of time-sense and memories for the protagonist in its structure. (Because time is very weird. Memories of the past can get all smooshed and jumbled together, losing sequence and contextual details.) But there’s always a risk of making the story harder to follow if it jumps around a lot, and so it was for me. (Maybe I was also just tired. I always struggle more when I’m tired.) Most of the stories, though, either moved linearly or made themselves easy enough to track.

One last comment: I could not read this collection at insomnia o’ clock because it would do the opposite of making me shut down. The stories were too interesting and stimulating. They would make my brain chew on things. These were perfect bite-sized narratives to read on my subway commute, though. I highly recommend it.

Anyway. I thought these stories were neat. If Every Galaxy a Circle sounds up your alley, give it a try!