I stumbled across Derek Fisher‘s work via this interview in X-R-A-Y, which led me to track down a handful of his stories for this post. I finally got around to his short story collection Container, and it delivers.
Container is a 2024 collection of 15 short stories, published by With an X Books. It’s a genre-bending trip through horror, weird fiction, and absurdist satire. Fisher is a Toronto writer who crafts stories that feel like liminal spaces: half-familiar, half-nightmare. It’s not for everyone, but if you’re into prose that’s equal parts grotesque and playful, this might scratch your itch.
The stories in Container are a strange set of of broken worlds and fractured minds. In “Bird Eating Glass”, a nonbinary noise diva rules a music scene with “scar and bone”. There’s a talking toy turtle that’s secretly a death-squad insurgent, and a post-apocalyptic Manhattan where mega-condos host orgies above flooded tunnels of waste.
One standout, “Scorch Earth” revolves around Lily, a kid whose parents have raised her to be a killer, to understand that there’s one perfect victim for everyone, and the purpose of life is to find “the one”. He describes it this way:
She believes in a “purpose-driven life” but doesn’t fully appreciate the fact that this idea has been dictated to her from birth. I think there’s an undercurrent of spirituality in that story, where her parents probably believe that by killing, by devoting their lives to the pursuit of taking life, they are somehow closer to god, or the devil, or whatever nasty thing they worship.
Fisher’s prose is tight and evocative, with a confidence that pulls you in. In the X-R-A-Y interview, Rebecca Gransden says it “strokes the lid of contemporary malaise”: stories like a restaurant worker with a lacerated arm revealing “new insides” of wires hit at tech’s creepy underbelly. Characters wrestle with dark impulses in diseased architectures, from scorched ghost towns to impossible buildings. It’s less supernatural than psychological, with a modern dread that’s both funny and bleak.
The range and variety of the stories is a strength. If it didn’t have a name on the cover, it would be easy to think that this was an anthology of different writers rather than a single author. From flash fiction to surreal novelettes, Fisher’s breadth of voices and styles, which makes this collection unexpectedly bingeable.
Further reading
Derek Fisher’s website (links to several stories)
