(By Justine Castellon / for Just Reading Nook) Richard R. Brown’s debut short story collection is speculative fiction in form — weird, unsettling, occasionally cosmic — but it reads less like a genre exercise than like grief that has been given permission to take unusual shapes. Across its stories, ordinary lives are interrupted by the inexplicable: a haunted bathroom wall threatens a man’s hard-won second chance at family, a bathtub with no business sitting in a forest clearing pulls hikers toward something they can’t outrun, and an alien invasion is witnessed by a man whose blindness turns out to be a form of perception rather than a vulnerability. Elsewhere, two souls bicker about their fates while watching their own bodies dissected, and a neighbor’s darkly funny confession about a dead woman’s ashes offers a rare moment of levity. Brown, who is legally blind, folds visually impaired characters throughout the collection as a natural feature of his fictional world rather than a novelty or an inspirational device. The book closes with a personal essay about the author’s father’s death from cancer, revealing the private wound the fiction was quietly built around all along.
What holds the collection together isn’t a single theme or tone — it ranges from Gothic dread to quiet science fiction to something closer to fable — but a consistent quality of attention. Brown writes as if the strange things in his stories matter because the ordinary things already demanded that seriousness, using the uncanny as pressure rather than decoration. Character work is a particular strength throughout: his people are parents, widowers, students, and strangers rendered with patience rather than flash, and the domestic openings land hardest because the horror enters through familiar doors rather than announcing itself. His prose style favors restraint over explanation — the strangeness arrives the way a scent arrives, pleasant first and wrong second, and by the time the reader registers what’s happening, the story has already closed its trap.
Pacing is largely confident, though not every piece holds the same weight. The star-extinction story is the collection’s most conceptually ambitious entry, but it’s also its most emotionally distant, keeping its characters at arm’s length in a way the more intimate stories don’t. The collection might have landed with even more force at a slightly tighter length, trimming the pieces that ask readers to engage with an idea before a person. Still, these are minor stumbles set against a debut that mostly does exactly what it sets out to do — and the stories that do land get under the skin and stay there.
Recommended for readers drawn to horror that bruises rather than shocks, and to speculative fiction rooted in real, recognizable human grief.
Read: Holes In The Somewhere: The Strange Places Grief Leaves Behind
Rating: ★★★★☆ 4 / 5
Holes In The Somewhere (2026)
Horror
Available in Kindle and Paperback at Amazon
Justine Castellon is a brand strategist with an innate ability to weave compelling narratives. She seamlessly blends her professional insight with her passion for literature. Her literary works include romantic drama novels—Four Seasons, The Last Snowfall, Gnight Sara / ‘Night Heck, and I Love You, Sunday Sunset. With her ability to tell stories that linger long after the last word, Justine leaves a mark not only in the world of branding but also in the hearts of her readers.
www.justcastellon.com
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