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Red Flags: Stories and Other Disturbances
Red Flags features eight new stories and three out-of-print chapbooks by the “scream queen of wild psycho-philosophical transgressive lit.”
“One of my favorite contemporary writers—Elsby’s voice winds its way into your head and smashes about like a trapped heron.”—B.R. YEAGER, author of Negative Space
“Elsby’s voice is daring, original, and wholly uncompromising.”—PAULA ASHE, Shirley Jackson Award-winning author of We Are Here to Hurt Each Other
“Depraved, stark, and dripping in blood... Unique prose, dark musings, and an experimental structure blend beautifully with the layers of grief and bodily autonomy.”—SARA TANTLINGER, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Devil’s Dreamland
“One of my favorite contemporary writers—Elsby’s voice winds its way into your head and smashes about like a trapped heron.”—B.R. YEAGER, author of Negative Space
“Elsby’s voice is daring, original, and wholly uncompromising.”—PAULA ASHE, Shirley Jackson Award-winning author of We Are Here to Hurt Each Other
“Depraved, stark, and dripping in blood... Unique prose, dark musings, and an experimental structure blend beautifully with the layers of grief and bodily autonomy.”—SARA TANTLINGER, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Devil’s Dreamland
212 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 30, 2024
21 people are currently reading
327 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
October 15, 2024
There are shades of a different Charlene Elsby here. One that's still as brainy and hyperraitonal, but that can also show vulnerability and empathy depending on the circumstances.
Not in a earnest, straightforward way (nothing about Charlene Elsby's writing could even be misconstrued as earnest nor straightforward), but the tone of certain of these stories shift. It's not always about the radical impossibility to connect anymore. She takes more of an observing stance towards that impossibility and new, heart-wrenching feelings arise. I dare you to stay cold at the opener Whitefish for Luna. It's an absolute gut punch.
There are three parts to this anthology featuring stories from various eras of her career, some poems and even a handful of short screenplays. Elsby is one of the most challenging and entertaining solipsists we have. Her writing is scary for a whole other reason that most scary writing is. It's scary because it takes a long, hard look at our built-in failures as a species.
More on Dead End Follies Friday.
Not in a earnest, straightforward way (nothing about Charlene Elsby's writing could even be misconstrued as earnest nor straightforward), but the tone of certain of these stories shift. It's not always about the radical impossibility to connect anymore. She takes more of an observing stance towards that impossibility and new, heart-wrenching feelings arise. I dare you to stay cold at the opener Whitefish for Luna. It's an absolute gut punch.
There are three parts to this anthology featuring stories from various eras of her career, some poems and even a handful of short screenplays. Elsby is one of the most challenging and entertaining solipsists we have. Her writing is scary for a whole other reason that most scary writing is. It's scary because it takes a long, hard look at our built-in failures as a species.
More on Dead End Follies Friday.
April 15, 2025
Full Review
Red Flags is an excellent collection. Perhaps it’s not the best place to start if you’re new to Charlene Elsby’s work, but if you’ve read and enjoyed at one of her books, then I highly recommend picking this up. Besides some top notch dark stories, you’ll also get some insight into her development as an author.
Red Flags is an excellent collection. Perhaps it’s not the best place to start if you’re new to Charlene Elsby’s work, but if you’ve read and enjoyed at one of her books, then I highly recommend picking this up. Besides some top notch dark stories, you’ll also get some insight into her development as an author.
November 22, 2024
One of my favorite collections I’ve read in years. The opening story “Whitefish for Luna,” grabbed my heart and shattered it with the beautiful mix of reality, gallows humor, and heartbreak of a death playing out before you. The entire collection is powerful hit after hit, and though you’ll walk away bruised and aching, you’ll be grateful for the experience. I couldn’t pick favorites because they were all so good, but the title story, “Red Flags,” was such an honest and brutal portrayal of abuse that I had to set the book down and cry; I felt so seen for the first time in a work of fiction. I’ll also add that the story “I Wish Cancer Were Contagious” was one of the most bittersweet things I’ve read.
If you’re one for brutal, honest storytelling that isn’t afraid to burrow straight for the heart, please pick this up. One of my top reads this year.
If you’re one for brutal, honest storytelling that isn’t afraid to burrow straight for the heart, please pick this up. One of my top reads this year.
November 30, 2024
“Ultimately what fate had delivered was freedom-from my own free will”
Red Flags is a collection of 8 new stories plus a collection unpublished/republished works from the author’s past, showing us the flags have been there all along, no surprise great things were to come. The characters in these stories are coming to terms with their fate and told through Charlene’s signature, biting style of logic and reason. Wicked, bleak, heartbreaking, and viciously funny. Some favorites are Repent!, Red Flags, Letter’s To Jenny (one of the best things I’ve read about grief), and The Most Beautiful Girl.
Red Flags is a collection of 8 new stories plus a collection unpublished/republished works from the author’s past, showing us the flags have been there all along, no surprise great things were to come. The characters in these stories are coming to terms with their fate and told through Charlene’s signature, biting style of logic and reason. Wicked, bleak, heartbreaking, and viciously funny. Some favorites are Repent!, Red Flags, Letter’s To Jenny (one of the best things I’ve read about grief), and The Most Beautiful Girl.
Read
February 26, 2025You’ll feel like you’ve been hit with a brutally honest car but you’ll hobble away thankful to have had your heart bones broken by reading it. Keep on bleeding.
(This review is for the Red Flags short story collection, not all the additional bonus content)
4.5⭐️
(This review is for the Red Flags short story collection, not all the additional bonus content)
4.5⭐️
November 2, 2024
Reading Charlene Elsby tends to give me anxiety and make my stomach clench up. There’s something dreadful in her prose and the magic she wields in her pen. Red Flags is a fun yet intense endurance test for those who like their fiction darker than dark.
October 25, 2024
I read this whole book in one go. I just couldn’t stop. Elsby is one of my favorite people writing today because her work is fearless, thoughtful, compelling and insightful. There’s so much to chew on here. There’s a line about how lying is necessary to survive in this world, but lying is for the stuff we do in motion. Sitting still, observing and reading what others have observed is the time for honesty and you won’t find a more honest author. But Elsby has a wonderful sense of the absurd and also reminds us that the most terrible things, the most serious things, are also a little funny. Or maybe the humor is the lie we tell ourselves to survive. Sounds good to me.
September 25, 2024
🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩
Charlene Elsby’s latest collection ‘Red Flags: Stories and Other Disturbances’ is quite the assortment- we have eight new stories in ‘Red Flags’, followed by three out-of-print chapbooks: ‘Letters to Jenny Just After She Died’, ‘AGYNY’, and ‘Dirt Wet with Blood’. It’s a hell of a lot of fun.
*very mild spoilers in my selection of quotes*
RED FLAGS
As Elsby wrote on Instagram, “I wrote the first story in Red Flags when a woman got run over and dragged at the intersection outside my apartment.
It's about what she was thinking as she died. According to a palliative care pamphlet I once read, we shouldn't expect dying people to suddenly become profound and spiritual. People have the same thoughts when they're dying as they ever did.
Then I wrote seven more stories about dying people. […]”
That’s what we have. Ordinary people, their ordinary thoughts, and their ordinary deaths. Well, most deaths are ordinary.
We see a hapless pedestrian, a slightly neurotic ex-girlfriend, a horrifically toxic dudebro’s medical horror, an avoidable workplace accident, a victim of domestic violence(/murder), an embittered cancer patient, a would-be poisoner, and a teenager locked out in the cold.
We’re locked into the minutiae that floats to the surface of unremarkable minds in the throes of life and those of death.
Like much of Elsby’s work, I find it hard to describe as the happenings are all very internal, but as always, she nails flawed characters, the flawed thinking we’re all guilty of and the glimmers of profundity therein, the bullshit we think worth our time and energy, and the black comedy of human tragedy of which no one escapes.
Some lines I particularly enjoyed:
“I hope Christina doesn’t watch the local news tonight. I hope she never realizes I’m gone. I hope she doesn’t have someone else she can pretend is a saint, because Ben wasn’t, and neither was I.”
“That I knew I was broken but didn’t have to be.
I couldn’t say all that because I wouldn’t. Because I lived out that life in my mind and found that, in the end, you were empty, as empty as I was, and that I’d have done that to you and couldn’t live with myself.”
“I thought of the relief you’d feel when she reported that I was most definitely dead. Because it’s sometimes better to have our choices taken away so that we can do what’s best. And it wasn’t working when it was up to my will or yours.”
“I couldn’t bear the dismissal of this man so below my station. Did he not realize the great fortune I had amassed? How the law, the physical law, and even the bounds of medical science, do not apply to me and my kind? His tone made me feel helpless in a way that I hadn’t experienced since she left me, since she FUCKING LEFT ME, [...] I was so angry that I cried.”
“But it was like how Shannon applies night cream to reduce the effects of aging—superficial,
ineffectual. FUCK, SHANNON, YOU’RE NOT GETTING ANY YOUNGER, SO WHY WON’T YOU GIVE UP AND LOVE ME!”
[*shudders*]
“The company will no longer require your services.”
Fucking right I hit that switch.”
“Maybe death is how I get out of this now.
Keep on bleeding.”
“People kill each other for looking the wrong way, not because of ennui. This is the fundamental assumption I was trying to break..”
“Oh god, what if I were saved?”
“Freedom from the cycling thoughts of the past, from the agonising temporality one must live through, from having to engage in planned and scripted conversations with other beings.”
LETTERS TO JENNY JUST AFTER SHE DIED
Very funny and very sad (-very Elsby), our nameless epistolist narrator tells Jenny everything as like a diary (“a letter that can’t be answered because it’s not to anyone.”), again zooming in, now to the subtleties and trivialities of acute grief and depression- she mourns her dead friend and heartbreakingly laments her incompleteness.
“I miss you, Jenny.
None of this is real. It doesn’t feel or look real, and besides all that, it can’t be. Reality shouldn’t be a conceptual framework one takes on daily just to get through. It’s not supposed to be something we adopt because it’s pragmatic. Without it, there’d be nothing.
That’s the thing though, isn’t it Jenny? It’s nothing. There’s nothing beyond the days left to live through and nothing up until that either.
You can’t have a limited condition where both sides are empty of values. Death isn’t the end. And not because there’s something after but because there isn’t, and there’s nothing here either.
Jenny, what the fuck did I do to deserve you?
. . .
Jenny,
I fucked the neighbour. […]”
——————
“Jenny, are you gone?
David tried his best and hardest, but it turns out no mechanical climax will bring your dead friends back.
Jenny, I just want you to tell me something I didn’t know before you died.
I don’t want that to be it for you.”
I grieved for my godmother this year (2024), and that last sentence really hit home.
AGYNY
A lightly edited version of the original short story which appeared on selffuck.help.
Our protagonist finds herself in an unhealthy relationship that really tests her limits, and it turns out that her limits are quite far reaching.
Why does she do what she does? Does she like it?
I can’t say for certain, but what she does next MAY shock you……
DIRT WET WITH BLOOD
Now this is interesting- an Elsby fiction written circa 2003, which as far as I can tell is a full 17ish years before her next published fiction with Hexis in 2020.
The introduction, which explains the problematic publication history fumbled by a problematic jackass of a man who “loved women of all ages”, is also very interesting.
So what is Dirt Wet with Blood?
Elsby says
“According to the filing with Library and Archives
Canada, this isn’t a book of fiction, or poetry, but rather “A play.” And I think that’s true.”
I’ll take her word for it, but I’ll add that it’s a series of strange vignettes in each of those aforementioned forms, ranging stylistically from verse poetry to surrealism to Beckett-esque duologues.
I particularly liked and related to ‘Dear Martha’.
To cap off this collection, we have two bonus pieces: the wonderfully creepy story ‘Whispers’, and ‘That’s Enough’, Elsby’s contribution to ‘Suicide: An Anthology’- a collection of writings from survivors of suicide- wherein the themes from ‘Letters to Jenny’ are revisited (retrovisited?), and perhaps comes from somewhere even more autobiographical than the true grief found in ‘Letters’.
I recommend highly.
Also, bloodied Charlene on the cover and title page is awesome.
*Thank you Charlene for the review copy!*
Charlene Elsby’s latest collection ‘Red Flags: Stories and Other Disturbances’ is quite the assortment- we have eight new stories in ‘Red Flags’, followed by three out-of-print chapbooks: ‘Letters to Jenny Just After She Died’, ‘AGYNY’, and ‘Dirt Wet with Blood’. It’s a hell of a lot of fun.
*very mild spoilers in my selection of quotes*
RED FLAGS
As Elsby wrote on Instagram, “I wrote the first story in Red Flags when a woman got run over and dragged at the intersection outside my apartment.
It's about what she was thinking as she died. According to a palliative care pamphlet I once read, we shouldn't expect dying people to suddenly become profound and spiritual. People have the same thoughts when they're dying as they ever did.
Then I wrote seven more stories about dying people. […]”
That’s what we have. Ordinary people, their ordinary thoughts, and their ordinary deaths. Well, most deaths are ordinary.
We see a hapless pedestrian, a slightly neurotic ex-girlfriend, a horrifically toxic dudebro’s medical horror, an avoidable workplace accident, a victim of domestic violence(/murder), an embittered cancer patient, a would-be poisoner, and a teenager locked out in the cold.
We’re locked into the minutiae that floats to the surface of unremarkable minds in the throes of life and those of death.
Like much of Elsby’s work, I find it hard to describe as the happenings are all very internal, but as always, she nails flawed characters, the flawed thinking we’re all guilty of and the glimmers of profundity therein, the bullshit we think worth our time and energy, and the black comedy of human tragedy of which no one escapes.
Some lines I particularly enjoyed:
“I hope Christina doesn’t watch the local news tonight. I hope she never realizes I’m gone. I hope she doesn’t have someone else she can pretend is a saint, because Ben wasn’t, and neither was I.”
“That I knew I was broken but didn’t have to be.
I couldn’t say all that because I wouldn’t. Because I lived out that life in my mind and found that, in the end, you were empty, as empty as I was, and that I’d have done that to you and couldn’t live with myself.”
“I thought of the relief you’d feel when she reported that I was most definitely dead. Because it’s sometimes better to have our choices taken away so that we can do what’s best. And it wasn’t working when it was up to my will or yours.”
“I couldn’t bear the dismissal of this man so below my station. Did he not realize the great fortune I had amassed? How the law, the physical law, and even the bounds of medical science, do not apply to me and my kind? His tone made me feel helpless in a way that I hadn’t experienced since she left me, since she FUCKING LEFT ME, [...] I was so angry that I cried.”
“But it was like how Shannon applies night cream to reduce the effects of aging—superficial,
ineffectual. FUCK, SHANNON, YOU’RE NOT GETTING ANY YOUNGER, SO WHY WON’T YOU GIVE UP AND LOVE ME!”
[*shudders*]
“The company will no longer require your services.”
Fucking right I hit that switch.”
“Maybe death is how I get out of this now.
Keep on bleeding.”
“People kill each other for looking the wrong way, not because of ennui. This is the fundamental assumption I was trying to break..”
“Oh god, what if I were saved?”
“Freedom from the cycling thoughts of the past, from the agonising temporality one must live through, from having to engage in planned and scripted conversations with other beings.”
LETTERS TO JENNY JUST AFTER SHE DIED
Very funny and very sad (-very Elsby), our nameless epistolist narrator tells Jenny everything as like a diary (“a letter that can’t be answered because it’s not to anyone.”), again zooming in, now to the subtleties and trivialities of acute grief and depression- she mourns her dead friend and heartbreakingly laments her incompleteness.
“I miss you, Jenny.
None of this is real. It doesn’t feel or look real, and besides all that, it can’t be. Reality shouldn’t be a conceptual framework one takes on daily just to get through. It’s not supposed to be something we adopt because it’s pragmatic. Without it, there’d be nothing.
That’s the thing though, isn’t it Jenny? It’s nothing. There’s nothing beyond the days left to live through and nothing up until that either.
You can’t have a limited condition where both sides are empty of values. Death isn’t the end. And not because there’s something after but because there isn’t, and there’s nothing here either.
Jenny, what the fuck did I do to deserve you?
. . .
Jenny,
I fucked the neighbour. […]”
——————
“Jenny, are you gone?
David tried his best and hardest, but it turns out no mechanical climax will bring your dead friends back.
Jenny, I just want you to tell me something I didn’t know before you died.
I don’t want that to be it for you.”
I grieved for my godmother this year (2024), and that last sentence really hit home.
AGYNY
A lightly edited version of the original short story which appeared on selffuck.help.
Our protagonist finds herself in an unhealthy relationship that really tests her limits, and it turns out that her limits are quite far reaching.
Why does she do what she does? Does she like it?
I can’t say for certain, but what she does next MAY shock you……
DIRT WET WITH BLOOD
Now this is interesting- an Elsby fiction written circa 2003, which as far as I can tell is a full 17ish years before her next published fiction with Hexis in 2020.
The introduction, which explains the problematic publication history fumbled by a problematic jackass of a man who “loved women of all ages”, is also very interesting.
So what is Dirt Wet with Blood?
Elsby says
“According to the filing with Library and Archives
Canada, this isn’t a book of fiction, or poetry, but rather “A play.” And I think that’s true.”
I’ll take her word for it, but I’ll add that it’s a series of strange vignettes in each of those aforementioned forms, ranging stylistically from verse poetry to surrealism to Beckett-esque duologues.
I particularly liked and related to ‘Dear Martha’.
To cap off this collection, we have two bonus pieces: the wonderfully creepy story ‘Whispers’, and ‘That’s Enough’, Elsby’s contribution to ‘Suicide: An Anthology’- a collection of writings from survivors of suicide- wherein the themes from ‘Letters to Jenny’ are revisited (retrovisited?), and perhaps comes from somewhere even more autobiographical than the true grief found in ‘Letters’.
I recommend highly.
Also, bloodied Charlene on the cover and title page is awesome.
*Thank you Charlene for the review copy!*
February 22, 2025
The author provided with a digital review copy. All views and opinions are my own.
-
Lurking around the digital space called The Horror literature community, it can be difficult to land on what you truly wish to read next, compared to what titles and authors are getting the most exposure in the digital aether So when I get a "Ping" regarding Charlene's collection, I give it focus.
Red Flag : Stories and Other Disturbances is an interesting and, to me, a very unique collection. Broken into sections, the first section takes its title from one of the included short pieces, and is also the title of this book "Red Flags". These are tales about relationships. That may sound vague, but in fact it is not. What defines a relationship, whether it be societal, interpersonal, intra-personal, abusive, toxic, real or imagined, Elsby has written pieces that look at this larger concept. The characters she brings to life feel fully formed, damaged and often disturbed. Horror is meant to shove us out of our comfort zone, and Splatterpunk especially, will transgress and get messy. The end result are stories that linger in the brain, and a testament to depth and breadth of Charlene Elsby's craft.
Letters to Jenny and AGYNY feel almost like stream of consciousness pieces at times, pieces where the reader feels almost trapped in the narrators skull, powerless and unable to turn away.
The final Section of this collection "Dirt Wet With Blood", was and is, something different. These are pieces from the authors past. Being given access to these older pieces, invokes a feeling a intimacy and honesty that moved me and left me humbled. The inclusion of these older pieces also a testament to how Elsby's has grown and evolved over the proceeding decades.
-
Lurking around the digital space called The Horror literature community, it can be difficult to land on what you truly wish to read next, compared to what titles and authors are getting the most exposure in the digital aether So when I get a "Ping" regarding Charlene's collection, I give it focus.
Red Flag : Stories and Other Disturbances is an interesting and, to me, a very unique collection. Broken into sections, the first section takes its title from one of the included short pieces, and is also the title of this book "Red Flags". These are tales about relationships. That may sound vague, but in fact it is not. What defines a relationship, whether it be societal, interpersonal, intra-personal, abusive, toxic, real or imagined, Elsby has written pieces that look at this larger concept. The characters she brings to life feel fully formed, damaged and often disturbed. Horror is meant to shove us out of our comfort zone, and Splatterpunk especially, will transgress and get messy. The end result are stories that linger in the brain, and a testament to depth and breadth of Charlene Elsby's craft.
Letters to Jenny and AGYNY feel almost like stream of consciousness pieces at times, pieces where the reader feels almost trapped in the narrators skull, powerless and unable to turn away.
The final Section of this collection "Dirt Wet With Blood", was and is, something different. These are pieces from the authors past. Being given access to these older pieces, invokes a feeling a intimacy and honesty that moved me and left me humbled. The inclusion of these older pieces also a testament to how Elsby's has grown and evolved over the proceeding decades.
January 23, 2025
I wish I can give an extending essay-ish review. But it’s difficult to put in to words all the emotions and thoughts feel for the book.
I thought this book was just as brutal and terrifying on so many levels as VF (violent faculties).
It left me feeling grossed out -😝🤮 - oddly a good thing.
I am so pleased to have read the book. I apologize it took a long time for my write up. Well, I was just caught up with other books I was reading. I lost track. But, glad to be back!
I thought this book was just as brutal and terrifying on so many levels as VF (violent faculties).
It left me feeling grossed out -😝🤮 - oddly a good thing.
I am so pleased to have read the book. I apologize it took a long time for my write up. Well, I was just caught up with other books I was reading. I lost track. But, glad to be back!
December 24, 2024
Comic, cruel, and precise as a scalpel.
March 9, 2025
really great, the one about the apartment should be a short film, all of them could be. the supplemental stuff I wasn’t as into but still obviously well written.
November 10, 2024
These stories are a wonderful showcase of Elsby's talent and range. I went from laughing out loud to staring off into space wondering wtf I just read.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews