Real World Horrors #1

Nonfiction Review and Recommendation for JT Blatty's Snapshots Sent Home - plus some exciting personal updates!

I am author Jonathan Gensler and this is the 10th edition of my newsletter. Thank you for reading!

In Snapshots Sent Home, Army veteran, photo journalist, and author JT Blatty paints as real a portrait of war in the modern era as I have encountered. A combat veteran myself (US Army 2000-2005), I know that nothing about combat is simple, especially not the labels we stick on anyone even remotely close to a battlefield. With Snapshots, Blatty weaves the story of her own time in combat as a young US Army officer with the years she has spent interviewing and memorializing the volunteers fighting against Russian aggression in Ukraine, often sharing bunkers with them as artillery fell all around.

She weaves this thread beautifully between her own experiences and the experiences of what, on the surface, might seem to be a fundamentally different enterprise and story of combat. In juxtaposing these two periods of warfare with up-close, in-your-face written images, she demonstrates how war and violence connect all veterans, across all time. She pushes through the hollowness she felt after her own experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq to find meaning and purpose in sharing the stories of men and women from the far side of the globe, fighting for the ideals that we too often merely pay lip service to in the West.

This book is a gift: of honesty; of unvarnished reality; of sadness; and even of the sparks of joy that are to be found in the killing fields of the world. It should be required reading for any future military officers, historians, and anyone who wants to be in touch with the heartbeat of the world. It earns its standing alongside such powerful war memoirs as Sledge's With the Old Breed and Sebastian Junger's more recent War.

---

What’s Been Happening with Me?

Since my last newsletter, I have received some tremendous news! I’ve seen another story released by CreepyPod; I’ve had two major short story acceptances by great markets, with contracts signed fairly quickly, and have a third story coming up in this month’s Shallow Waters Flash Fiction Contest!

1. CreepyPod released a gorgeously produced a 12 minute audio version of my short story “The Demon in the Closet,” which dives into the mind of a young adult on a hallucinogenic trip, gun violence, and sex. It is behind their Patreon paywall, but you can listen to the first several minutes for free.

1. Grendel Press accepted my short story “Into the Casbah” for their upcoming anthology The Midnight Labyrinth. This story tells the tale of Sarah Chambers, a journalist embedded with a US Army infantry platoon during the early years of the Iraq War, as they chase an attacker into an ancient ruin in the desert, and get stuck there during a sandstorm. When the storms dies down, she discovers all the exits are closed and the soldiers around her are losing their minds. The anthology should be forthcoming later in 2024. This is the story that will push me over the top of the requirements for full membership in the Horror Writers Association—a big deal to a new writer like me.

   

2. On Spec Magazine has accepted my story “You Ain’t Supposed to Die on a Saturday Night,” about a killer rock song, by which I mean that any time the band plays it, someone close to the frontman dies. What does he do as their fame grows along with the online mythology of the song; the pressure mounting to play the song one last time?

   

3. “The Demon in the Closet” in print will be released in a week or so from Crystal Lake Publishing’s Shallow Waters, as a finalist in this month’s Corvid (think black birds like crows and ravens) themed contest.

In the comments, let me know what you are reading! Thanks for sticking with me, and stay in touch!

JG