Bellatrix Sakakino has lived many lives. She dampens electricity. She’s radioactive. She longs for a fruit that went extinct before she was born. She’s not above committing a massacre for the sake of a perfect omelet.
She crashes through timelines and circumstances, recurring in these flash stories as a tricksterish film director, a pink hedgehog, a simulation of herself, or a child who can only speak in dial-up modem shrieks.
Are we the same person we were last year? Or last week? Or last story? Whimsical and dolorous, ironic and absurd, this slippery assortment of stories dances around these questions with ambiguous aplomb.
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Melancholic Parables is on Goodreads and Storygraph and Indie Story Geek. Rating and reviewing is the way to an author’s heart.
If your local library supports the Hoopla streaming service, you can check out Melancholic Parables for free with your library card. That link is here.
There is no proper Melancholic Parables audiobook, but I do have a feed of recordings of myself reading the stories. You can search for “Melancholic Parables” on podcast apps like Apple Podcasts, or listen on Spotify or Substack.
Nadia Bruce-Rawlings gave the book a splendid review on A Thin Slice of Anxiety.
Kimberlee Frederick wrote an insightful review which you can find here on the Wrong Publishing tumblr.
Briar Ripley Page has written a lovely review of the collection. I've posted it in full on my blog.
Zilla Novikov reviewed Melancholic Parables on the Night Beats blog.
Jenni on Rosie Amber’s book blog calls the book “brief, beautiful, funny, and disconcerting” in a perceptive review.
I’ve curated a list on Shepherd of books like Melancholic Parables which string together many smaller pieces for an overarching effect. Go buy those books. And mine, maybe.
“Stromberg gifts us a soft-spoken superhero with an all-in-one metaphysical toolbox. Bellatrix, like a Dirk Gently of reincarnation, navigates the ordinary in an extraordinary way. Encounters with to be and not to be: vulnerable yet ungovernable, tragicomic and ignormal. Shimmering reinvention. She already knows, and so will you.”
— Tucker Lieberman, author of Most Famous Short Film of All Time
“Wistful nihilism holds hands with absurd humor and lighthearted whimsy—some of the stories are almost horror, some are almost jokes. The parables challenge the very idea of an individual, consistent being and personality. We find ourselves drawn to ask how we are the same people we were in childhood, or the same people we are in dreams, or the same people we will be thirty years from now, or the same people we are when we’re blackout drunk. Maybe we’re not.”
— Briar Ripley Page, author of Corrupted Vessels
“The stories Dale writes are poignant, funny, tragic, and thought-provoking at each turn of the page. There’s a subtle and skillful dreamlike craft to the way he makes even the utterly absurd feel entirely natural in his short fictional worlds, and every story in this collection is a kind of gift: a chance to discover new perspectives.”
— Hengtee Lim, author of Something Like Hope
“This is a witty, clever book, but it’s also a dark work: a work of uneasy ghosts and climate change, of loving your abuser and hating yourself.”
— Zilla Novikov, author of Query