I’ve been listening through the Knifepoint Horror archives over the last two years, and it’s the formula that Soren Narnia uses that gets to me. Almost every story starts with the narrator introducing themselves, and then telling about an experience from their past. Narnia’s way of telling stories is basically an updated version of those early novels where the plot was an account (written or told) told to the person actually telling the reader. These constraints (the story is told by a person still living, consists of what they’ve directly experienced or through hearsay, and the conversational tone) deepen the stories, which are also often small, recollections of events that matter to the narrator and maybe a few other people, at most.
That’s what “Sideswipe” is. A story about a priest on a downswing in his life, driving home, and accidentally sideswiping another vehicle when an elk runs across the road. The driver of the sideswiped vehicle is angry, too angry for just a little minor damage to his car. Something moves ominously in the man’s trunk. And what happens is an almost glancing, personal take on a classic movie monster that dances with Robert Aickman’s level of the personal and the strange. Give it a listen.
Andrew Kozma’s fiction appears in Apex, Factor Four, and Analog, while his poems appear in Strange Horizons, The Deadlands, and Contemporary Verse 2. His first book of poems, City of Regret, won the Zone 3 First Book Award, and his second book, Orphanotrophia, was published in 2021 by Cobalt Press. You can find him on Bluesky at @thedrellum.bsky.social and visit his website at www.andrewkozma.net