Josh Goller

The Molotov Cocktail Josh Goller

Explosive flash fiction from the first year of quarterly contests at the The Molotov Cocktail lit zine. This anthology includes the prize winners and honorable mentions in our Flash Monster, Flash Future, Flash Fool, and Flash Fury contests.

Selected by Josh Goller and Mary Lenoir Bond, the 40 bite-sized stories found within these pages are strange and surreal, dark and offbeat, bizarre and unsettling, with some wry humor to boot.

In Erica David's Flash Monster winner, "I, Homunculus," we read the first-person origin story of a creature born from a mandrake root under a gallows. In Sarena Ulibarri's Flash Future winner, "Natural Selection," the deer have taken over the neighborhood as humanity has succumbed to a horrific virus that turns people feral. Meanwhile, "Our Little Ghost" by JT Gill, winner of the Flash Fool contest, reflects upon an otherworldly child who appears in a boathouse. And the Flash Fury winner, "Goodbye, Sunshine" by Sylvia Heike, shares the inner monologue of an insidious presence inside a yellow-obsessed mind.



Elsewhere, we have shadow monsters, alien babies, genetically-engineered giants, drugs that might make you disappear, time travel, highway snipers, van-driving cult leaders, fiery plane crashes, shamanistic butchers, fortress-building pigs, punchline-delivering grim reapers, macabre brothels, overprotective mothers, sinister fuzz, and much more.

In addition to contributors listed above, this anthology also includes work by Ian Shine, Jo Gatford, Barbara Leahy, Christopher Allen, Jeffrey Spinazzola, Marie Gethins, Puneet Dutt, Chris White, Chris Milam, Alex Cothren, David Novak, Anthony Nichols, Carlos Orozco, Colton Adrian, Tracy Garbutt, John Rickett, Stephanie Roman, Christina Villafaña Dalcher, Nicholas Lamb, Fred Senese, Melissa Monks, Lindsay Dick, Heidi Sterling, Joseph Grantham, Kyle Yadlowski, and Holly Collingwood.