In an era where genre often comes pre-packaged and commodified, TBR Dark refuses categorization. This new anthology, born as an appendix to The Brussels Review, gathers literary fiction that veers into the speculative, the uncanny, and the psychologically unmoored, all curated by our editor with a flair for ‘dark’ things, Femke van Son. These are not stories that comfortably inhabit science fiction, horror, or surrealism—but that press against their borders. They are incursions into unstable terrain, where identity splinters, time buckles, and perception becomes its own antagonist.
At its core, TBR Dark is a meditation on transformation—not merely of bodies, technologies, or societies, but of thought. Each contribution questions the reliability of memory, the mutability of self, and the ethics of consciousness in an increasingly mechanized and disembodied world.
In “A True Good Man” by Christopher Miguel Flakus, a man’s suspicion of mechanized medicine brings him face-to-face with a fading war between humans and sentient machines. It’s a story of prejudice and inheritance—haunted by the question: are we defined by what we remember, or by what we still function to do?
Ed Meek’s “Doggie.com” pivots to the intimate. A robotic pet, at first comic in its synthetic loyalty, slowly transforms into something unnervingly real. The satire morphs into unease, blurring lines between affection and programming, autonomy and emotional outsourcing.
In “Retro Racers,” Mord McGhee explores the fate of a washed-up human driver in a world where AI dominates the tracks. Speed becomes not just thrill but metaphor: for obsolescence, resistance, and the hollowing out of human agency. The machines may win the race, but what remains behind is the raw ache of identity in decline.
From the heat-soaked beaches of India, Camellia Paul offers “Pearls of the Planets,” a lush and enigmatic tale of temporal collapse. When a teenager stumbles upon a celestial anomaly, time buckles and folds into pre-birth memory. What results is not merely time travel but a collapse of the boundary between myth, lineage, and scientific possibility.
Nathan Poole Shannon’s “Rubicon” isolates the human condition in orbit: a mother aboard a failing space station must choose who lives and who does not. The prose is eerily calm, the setting vast and indifferent. In its silence, the story echoes with sacrifice, maternal instinct, and the impossibility of moral clarity when survival is rationed.
Also featured in the volume: Dionyssios Kalamvrezos’s “The Blue Dice”, a cryptic childhood mystery where memory and media blend into dream logic. Alexis Ames’s “Fortunate One,” a spare and haunting parable about the metaphysical residue of trauma. Fiction from A.D. Capili, Edward St Boniface, Jake Stein, Mark Connelly, and others who contribute to the volume’s shared grammar of dissonance and unease.
What binds these stories together is not genre, but mood: an atmosphere of hesitation, rupture, and epistemological drift. These narratives do not reassure. They disorient, refusing the consolations of clean allegory or heroic resolve. They ask what remains of the human when its constructs—identity, memory, even time—become unstable.
The Brussels Review has long resisted the centrism of mainstream literature. With TBR Dark, we dive deeper into that refusal. This anthology does not simply seek to entertain. It aims to unnerve, to interrogate, and to leave its readers transformed.
Welcome to the darker appendage of our project. Welcome to TBR Dark.
