Short Stories Without Provocation

A collection of quaint and quirky speculative fictions, Y.M. Valentonis’ Short Stories Without Provocation are experimental narratives from the beginnings of history to today’s coffe blog post. These cozy-horror, bizarro-folklore, and slipstream tales have a Southern Acid Gothic flare. The eight sections are thematic patchwork storiy composites expanding upon each other.

Like all folktales, motifs and themes recur: cooking, music, and work. Once the reader gets used to the surrealistic world, they are brought back to reality by a child coming to understand divorce, a woman realizing her abusive work relation, or the final confrontation with a childhood bully.