Some Phantom/No Time Flat: Two Novellas

by Stephen Beachy

A pair of novellas, lyrical, haunting, and bleak, that offer an unsparing yet emotionally rich vision of contemporary America. In Some Phantom an unnamed woman arrives in a strange city, fleeing a violent relationship. She begins to explore the city and its inhabitants and takes a job teaching disturbed children, but finds her own mental stability becoming more and more precarious. A marriage of The Turn of the Screw and Carnival of Souls, Some Phantom poses questions about the line between memory and madness, between fantasy and abuse.

These questions are further elaborated in No Time Flat, which follows Wade, a boy living a somewhat isolated existence with his elderly parents on the American plains, as he makes his way through a childhood marked by playground shootings and mysterious strangers. Wade then becomes a wanderer himself, inhabiting a sparse landscape of fleeting connections, lost children, and unformulated crimes.

256 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 18, 2013

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.