I have a new story available online at The Dark magazine, “Rare Bindings”.
This is a story I wrote this fall for a Halloween office party at my place of work, which happens to be a library. A good opportunity, I thought, to write about how magical I think libraries and archives are, and to give it an occult twist. It was also a chance for me finally to be able to write about an experience during my undergrad years where friends and I were asked to start a new club on campus — a club devoted to the study of stage magic, card magic, magic history, etc. — because a major donor requested it. The story also, perhaps inevitably, reflects my conflicted feelings about working in an academic institution. Indeed, I almost titled it something like “The Institution Will Not Love You Back” to reflect an important motto in the world of academic labor (and many other fields). But I liked the multiplicity of meaning in the title “Rare Bindings” (in addition to the bibliographic term, think also of binding spells).
I owe thanks to all my colleagues at Lamson Library for inspiration (for the good stuff, not the scary parts of the story!) and to editor Sean Wallace for giving my work a home in The Dark once again.
It’s a tough time to publish fiction magazines right now, with sources of revenue few and far between, with magazines being inundated with attacks by “AI”, etc. I continue to be impressed that The Dark is committed both to making its contents free to read online and to paying its writers. It’s impossible to do both without support. If you enjoy short fiction like this and want to see more of it, please consider subscribing to The Dark or making a donation.
