Welcome to FicStack’s final curation post of the year. The curators have outdone themselves and successfully navigated awkward social gatherings, and found some gems for you to read over the holidays.

Be sure to give the featured authors a read, a like, drop them a comment, and maybe give them a restack.

Wendy Russell, Sass&Sage

Stuck with family, full of sugar, and desperately in need of good reading? Same. These two stories are my Christmas picks from FicStack—wildly different, equally excellent, and perfect company for that strange limbo between lunch and leftovers. Massive love to this clever, generous community, and wishing you a Christmas that’s exactly the right level of cosy, chaotic, or quietly feral.

• “Jack and the Beanstalk Café” by Happy Nielson. A hidden London café, immortal staff, supernatural regulars—and one human who should never have found the door. Jack and the Beanstalk Café blends cosy fantasy, slow-burn intrigue, and found family over cups of tea and ancient magic. If you like Legends & Lattes, Good Omens, The Night Circus, or the quietly magical feeling of a café that knows more than it should, this is your vibe. The first chapter is charming, sharply written, and effortlessly visual—the kind of opening that feels tailor-made for a TV pilot. Festive without being saccharine, funny without being flippant, it’s threaded through with just enough danger to keep you turning pages, perfect Christmas reading for anyone who likes their magic subtle, their characters sharp, and their cafés hiding ancient secrets.

• “Feverchain” by MA Knight, Behind the Grin. Oh, you want lesbian werewolves for Christmas? Cool. I’ve got you covered. Feverchain, a serial by MA Knight opens in a greasy-spoon diner in a nowhere town, where Bianca—sharp, anxious, and painfully self-aware—collides with Gwen, the mayor’s daughter freshly returned and very much not the girl she used to be. This first chapter crackles with queer tension, small-town claustrophobia, and a voice so vivid you can feel the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead. It’s funny, sweaty, intimate, and threaded with a sense that something feral is coiled just beneath the surface. If you like queer horror with teeth, messy women who take up space, and slow-burn menace that smells like coffee and grease, Feverchain is a perfect, slightly unhinged Christmas read.

Inga Jones, Thriller Tips for Writers

I recently took a class about Hacking Writing on a Line Level. It inspired me to look for skillful, arresting prose. Both of these stories were found using FicStack.

• “Hull” by Andy Edge. This micro (less than 1,000 words) horror story is about a relationship gone bad. The sharpness of the language is masterful. The author wastes no words, but still manages to create a past, a present, and even a future for the protagonist. The story also leaves room for the reader to infer what happened through context clues, rather than spelling everything out.

• “Silent Strides” by Sean Newman, Super Short Stories. This is a contemporary micro fiction (less than 1,000 words). It takes place during a competitive run. Silent Strides explores the penance some people pay for mistreating others in their youth, and how our assumptions aren’t always correct.

Connor Mancuso, Ink and Entropy

Apparently my brain has decided this season’s theme is the void and everything that crawls around inside it. All three of these pieces orbit cosmic emptiness, hunger, and the kind of scale that makes your ribs feel too small. Some are deadly serious, one is gloriously unhinged—but they all stare into the same black mouth.

• “Void” by Spencer D.W., Spencer’s Cult of Forbidden Horrors. This one is straight-up cosmic horror poetry, stripped down to nerve and nerve-ending. Void reads like someone praying to a devouring universe and not entirely minding if it answers. The imagery is all teeth, gas, liquefied self, and blackness that’s almost intimate. It’s short, but it leaves that aftertaste of “am I a person, or just a membrane wrapped around something older?” If you like your verse jagged and your cosmos hostile, go here.

• “Devour” by Bradley Ramsey, The Writer’s Journey. Classic cosmic dread in a sci-fi skin. Devour starts with Cerafis—an impossibly huge, flesh-like organism eating stars and galaxies from a “safe” distance—and slowly walks you into the terrible realization that there is no safe distance. The mission to wound it, the dive into its veins, the journey toward the heart, and that final, brutal twist about what’s at the center… it all hits that perfect “of course it was us” note. The last lines reframe everything as inheritance, not accident. If you’re into stories where the universe is made of meat and the hunger is mutual, you’ll devour this one.

• “Black Hex Zine” by Mac Sitko, Third Eye Horror. This one is pure cosmic body horror with a zine at the center of it—so obviously I was already sold. Black Hex Zine starts with a weird little DIY publication arriving in butcher paper and immediately leans into the gross in the best way: pages made of meat, fibres knitting themselves into an impossible lattice, the text only visible through porous strands. It escalates fast and clean—reading turns into eating, the zine starts growing, and before long the narrator is basically in an arms race with their own mutating body under a red, wrong-looking moon.

What I love here is how tight the story is: no wasted motion, just one disturbing, memorable image after another (fridge-lit meat zine, frying bits of yourself in a pan, becoming a “cathedral of flesh”) while a bigger, unseen presence presses in behind the blood moon. If you like your horror visceral, weirdly devotional, and ending in full-body transformation, this is a perfect little nightmare snack.

Qibra, Qibra

As 2025 comes to a close, here are two stories that won’t let you settle into comfortable holiday cheer, and that’s exactly why they’re worth your time. One is a Black Mirror-esque nightmare and the other starts as a Hallmark romance and becomes something else entirely. Grab your cocoa or favorite warm beverage and settle in. These stories reward attention and respect your time.

• “The Christmas Contract” (Parts 1-3) by RM Greta, In a Room. I was enjoying The Christmas Contract until Part 3 ended and I realized I’d been reading the wrong story the entire time. What starts as a pitch-perfect Hallmark Romance delivers a stunning meta-twist that reveals the real horror: a writer trapped by commercial success. Imagine being excellent at something you never wanted to do. RM Greta writes a complete, sincere Hallmark romance, then pulls the rug from under you. You can enjoy it as pure holiday romance, or continue with TCC: Blood & Sin, which explores the darker consequences for horror writer Maritza Dubois. Genre-bending, clever and exactly the kind of story that should be on your winter reading list.

• “Flagged as 97% AI” by Ellis Elms. I thought I was reading investigative journalism about AI detection scams. Then, midway through, I realized this is fiction, which somehow made it more terrifying. This story resonates with the time we’re living in. Write well: Get flagged as AI…by an AI. Revise to seem more ‘’human’’: Get flagged worse. This reads like it could happen tomorrow or worse, it’s already happening. For readers like me who love Black Mirror, Kafkaesque systems and stories that make you say “oh god, this is real.” Ellis Elms calls his work UFiction (Uncomfortable Fiction), and this delivers exactly that.

Tina Crossgrove, Existential Dread and Other Hobbies

This time of year is hard for a lot of people, myself included, for many different reasons. Some folks are lonely; others are worried about how to afford the holiday their family deserves. Because of that, I went looking for something a little different than the darker stories I’m usually drawn to—stories with warmth and light, and just a touch of contemplation to sit with us as the year turns.

• “Midwinter” by Iain M Norman, Iain M Norman’s Fiction. The Winter Solstice, December 21, is the shortest day and longest night of the year. Paradoxically, it also marks the turning point when days begin to lengthen and light slowly starts to push back the darkness of winter. This poem beautifully captures that moment, honoring the rhythms of the ages and the quiet hope that emerges as the world begins its gradual return toward spring. Ian Norman’s voice is also an absolute treat… Give a listen!

• “The Unicorn that Ruined Christmas” by Hallie T, Fabled Lines: Soft Magic with a Sharp Wit. This short, chaotic story is framed as a North Pole press conference after Santa swaps out his striking reindeer for unicorns—predictably, things go hilariously wrong. Glitter disasters, rainbow exhaust, and labor disputes mix with pop-culture jokes, all treated with total seriousness, which makes it even funnier. It never punches down, drawing its humor from the shared chaos and stress of the holidays. Light, ridiculous, and perfectly timed for this season, it’s a reminder that sometimes the best way to survive the holidays is just to laugh at the glitter mess.

Congratulations if you are a featured author!

As the year is coming to a close I want to thank the FicStack team for helping to make all of this possible. I also want to thank the wider community for embracing this crazy FicStack concept.

Here’s to 2026!

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