This volume of The Conium Review features nine new stories from Tamara K. Walker, Jay Vera Summer, Matthew Kirkpatrick, Rebekah Bergman, Kevin Finucane, Stephanie Wang, Simone Person, Rachel Lyon, and J. L. Montavon. Readers will experience ghostly encounters, a sentient chalkboard, trippy art museum exhibits, and other surreal fictions. Inventive prose, dark satire, and compelling characters abound throughout this collection.

This volume includes I Am Me, by Kevin Finucane, winner of The Conium Review’s 2017 Innovative Short Fiction Contest. The contest was judged by Stephen Graham Jones, author of Mongrels, After the People Lights Have Gone Off, The Last Final Girl, and several other books. Stephen said Life moves pretty fast in the here and now, and ‘I Am Me’ gets it on the page with enough terror and comedy and longing that we can’t help but see ourselves there. It’s a scary, twisted reflection, but it’s a lot more helpful than the nice easy lies we usually get told.