"Queen Midnight" in The Dark Magazine

I am pleased to announce that my newest story, "Queen Midnight", can now be read in the latest issue (May 2017) of The Dark Magazine.

MAY 2017

Each month The Dark brings you the best in dark fantasy and horror! Edited by award winning editors Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Sean Wallace and brought to you by Prime Books, this issue includes two all-new stories and two reprints:

“The Bone Beaters” by A.M. Muffaz
“The Lark Ascending” by Samantha Henderson (reprint)
“Queen Midnight” by Eliza Victoria
“When We Taste of Death” by Damien Angelica Walters (reprint)

It starts like this:

“They say its eyelids have gone down another meter,” Abi said, her voice echoing in the stairwell. “It’s just a matter of time. Maybe in three years, it’ll finally close his eyes and stop giving us nightmares.”

“Are you looking at Bakunawatch again?” Mimi asked, the balloon squeaking in her hands. Abi raised her cell phone. The screen showed the monster’s face, eyes like a pair of bloody tumors protruding above sharp, pointed teeth the size of skyscrapers.

Paula frowned at them both. “What a stupid name,” she said. “It doesn’t even look like a sea serpent.” Scientists had likened it to the giant Grenadier fish, a deep-sea fish with large mouth and eyes, except that this one was truly gigantic, with the tip of its head resting on what used to be Alesund in Norway and its tail brushing what used to be Krasnoyarsk in Russia, a body length of more than four thousand kilometers. Some fiction writer, in an attempt to reference local mythology, called the creature “Bakunawa” on social media. Her post was shared more than eighty thousand times, and now the name still stuck, five years after the Surfacing. She also coined the term “Surfacing”, to describe the day the creature began to appear from the depths of the ocean. A girl’s got to do what a girl’s got to do, Paula thought. Some turn to naming the unnamable; others join a sad, undermanned, underfunded, wish-granting nonprofit organization, pretending the world is still sane.

Read more.

Here's a review from Quick Sip Reviews:

“Queen Midnight” by Eliza Victoria (3132 words)

This is a creepy little story about a group of friends, Paula, Mimi, and Abi, who are all part of a non-profit going around trying to grant wishes to people with terminal conditions. In the state the world is in, though, that becomes something of a complicated goal. An enormous fish has risen from the depths of the ocean and in so doing has split part of the land, has destroyed nations and started to have other effects on people living nearby, as the main characters discover. To me the story is about loneliness and reaching for people to break that loneliness. It’s about the way that people face the end of things, too, as there is the lingering possibility that this fish represents something more than just a strange presence in the world. It seems to hardly notice humanity, like its living on a completely different scale, and through that it is confronting people with the fact that they are small. That all of their endeavors, regardless of kind or quality, seem to pale before the specter of this giant fish. In that it has a touch of the sublime to it, this immeasurable presence that they are doing their best not to ignore exactly but to not look at too closely, until it becomes something that they cannot avoid, that they have to confront. And I like how the story deals with that, love the voices of the characters as they sort of realize that the mundanity of life doesn’t really change even in the face of huge events, even in the path of a possible end of the world. The story is filled with these desolate details, of so much missing to the world, and how they’ve gotten used to it, learned how to navigate, and in some ways by doing so accepted it. Accepted that things might be changing and there might be nothing to stop it. That, even, nothing should be done to stop it. It’s tackles the complexity of dealing with something that might be terminal and finding peace with it. And it’s a lovely, rather haunting story!