Some Phantom/No Time Flat: Two Novellas

by Stephen Beachy

“Stephen Beachy is a visionary. In these twin novellas, he explores madness and crime with the nocturnal lyricism of empty time and space. Beachy’s dear criminals reach an exquisite isolation and so does his reader, a non place where categories collapse, like freedom and confinement, chaos and lucidity, the angelic and demonic. A harsh dream, and we will never wake.” - Robert Glück

In Some Phantom a woman arrives in a strange city, fleeing an abusive relationship. She gets a job teaching disturbed children, explores the city, fears her old life catching up with her. She must decide whether her increasing paranoia is a form of psychosis—or a new lucidity. A bastard offspring of The Turn of the Screw and Carnival of Souls, it roams the border territory between memory and insanity, fantasy and violence.

In No Time Flat, Wade grows up in isolation on the American plains, living mostly in his dreams. Caught between the silences of his elderly parents and the permutations of his own fantasies, his childhood seems to last forever. Haunted by strange encounters and a shooting at his school, he finally escapes and becomes nomadic, wandering across desolate landscapes marked by fleeting connections and unfathomable crimes.

266 pages, Paperback

Published May 12, 2026

About the author

Stephen Beachy is a writer. He was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1965. His first novel, The Whistling Song, was published by W. W. Norton with cover illustrations by Curt Kirkwood in 1991 and his second, Distortion, by Harrington Park Press, in 2000. Two novellas, Some Phantom and No Time Flat were published in 2006, from Suspect Thoughts Press. His fiction has been published in BOMB, Chicago Review, Blithe House Quarterly, SHADE, and various anthologies. He has written literary criticism for the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

In October, 2005, he published an article in New York Magazine, exposing the writer JT LeRoy as the concoction of a woman named Laura Albert, with the help of her family members.

Beachy teaches in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco.

Beachy is also a second cousin of biologist Philip Beachy and historian Robert Beachy.