Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2025

Andrew Leon Hudson

B oth of our previous annual crime review roundups have included stories in TOUGH from Redneck Press, but this may be the last time that happens as, communicated via a cut-to-the-chase post at the start of September thanking past contributors, the zine is now on indefinite hiatus, bringing to an end eight years of operations. If I’m being honest, as a reader I found its offerings a very mixed bag, though there were some good tales in there for sure. To which point, three stood out for me over its final nine months.

Keeper by Scott Blackburn slips us into lives sunk to the bottom but (mostly) determined to pull themselves up to see better days, and shines a light on the good, and bad, choices such determination may inspire in moments of looming crisis. The musically motivated Shriek of the Week by Nick Mamatas feels increasingly irreal, drifting almost dreamily alongside a disfigured dropout with a head full of school-shooting buckshot that picks up heavy metal airplay from local radio stations, tormented by conspiracies of corrupt COVID cops in a locked-down NYC. But my favourite was probably Vinnie Hansen’s Justice Served, a San Diego acid-trip to SeaWorld that’s actually (or rather also) a private eye yarn in a fairly classic vein: a brutal mystery to be explored and explained, by a social outsider with a nose for information and a smoking hot blonde for a client. Good fun.

It’s always a shame when a publication closes its doors, but the short genre fic business is very much this fallen comrade’s namesake: tough.

I n between the gone for good and a new kid on the block, the evergreen Shotgun Honey has been chambering rounds and pulling the trigger on the crazy regular for almost fifteen years. Call it “sawn-off” fiction rather than “flash”, three recent releases caught my eye, one of them very much off the beaten path for crime.

The other two first. Death Valley by Jacob Sloane does what super-short fiction is best at: setting things up quick then getting out quick too. In this case, a classic aftermath scene gets a bittersweet twist, heavier on the bitter than the sweet. By comparison, with only a slightly longer word count In a Cage with the Sharks by Hubble Stark somehow manages to seem to take its time, recounting a history, inhabiting its characters, before twisting fate in a way that, yes, you do see coming, but completely don’t mind being right about.

And now for that third. When I see the title Among the Neanderthals in a zine like this, my mind goes to street thugs, prison yards, that sort of setting – even when author Richie Narvaez started on about caves and tribes and brow ridges and flint-lit fires I thought it must be metaphor. But no: this yarn takes place in the pre-history of our species, and the crime in question could be anything from kidnap to genocide.

What’s the moral? Don’t bring a rock to an arrow fight, maybe…

M y final recommendation is more like a case of first amongst equals, as out of the first five stories to appear in Cold Caller, a new substack crime zine, four struck me as more or less equally interesting reads. I won’t link them all, there’s few enough to sift through, and while I could as easily have gone for Strangers, Used to Be Some Kind of Badass, or When Things Get a Little Western, the one I’ll mention in particular is Colleen Quinn’s Calamity Creek.

What begins as reminiscences about that type of faintly notorious local kid you used to distantly know growing up segues into a glimpse of a community’s dirty little open secret, evoking a character-filled corner of small town USA that crams remarkable breadth and depth into its tight, brief runtime. I really enjoyed the writing in Calamity Creek, the personalities and situations past and present all rang true, and I could happily have kept reading beyond where it came to a halt. On the other hand, they do say Always leave them wanting more.

The four stories I named are all very different and I enjoyed them in different ways, but I’ll make an observation verging on critique: in each case, I felt that the story’s end was not its strongest feature. The fifth piece, The Man Who Hated Dogs, which was certainly not bad, did strike me as a somewhat more “complete” narrative, though for me it also signposted itself way too clearly, right from that title. Nevertheless, on the strength of their early output I’ll certainly keep an eye on Cold Caller in the future.

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