Distributed for Autumn House Press
Heartland Calamitous
Emerging from deep in America’s hinterland, Michael Credico’s flash fiction portrays an absurdist, exaggerated, and bizarre vision of the Midwest known as the heartland. The stories are clipped views into a land filled with slippery confusion and chaos, mythical creatures, zombies, comic violence, shapeshifters, and startling quantities of fish. The characters of Heartland Calamitous are trying to sort out where, who, and what they are and how to fit into their communities and families. Environmental destruction, aging, ailing parents, apathy, and depression weigh on the residents of the heartland, and they can’t help but fall under the delusion that if they could just be somewhere or someone or something else, everything would be better. This is a leftover land, dazed and dizzy, where bodies melt into Ziplock bags and making do becomes a lifestyle.
The stories of Heartland Calamitous, often only two or three pages long, reveal a dismal state in which longing slips into passive acceptance, speaking to the particular Midwestern feeling of being stuck. They slip from humor to grief to the grotesque, forming a picture of an all-to-close dystopian quagmire. With this collection, Credico spins a new American fable, a modern-day mythology of the absurd and deformed born of a non-place between destinations.
The stories of Heartland Calamitous, often only two or three pages long, reveal a dismal state in which longing slips into passive acceptance, speaking to the particular Midwestern feeling of being stuck. They slip from humor to grief to the grotesque, forming a picture of an all-to-close dystopian quagmire. With this collection, Credico spins a new American fable, a modern-day mythology of the absurd and deformed born of a non-place between destinations.

Reviews
Table of Contents
Western
Sister
Killing Square
Baby
Heartland Calamitous
Postwar: Lake Michigan
Redbird
Pines
Heartland Aquatic
This Boy Here. He Will Kill You.
My Mother Took to Keeping Tigers
Postwar: Heartland
I Am the Heaviest Feeling Man on the Planet
Love to a Monster
A Black Eye. A Drowned Eye.
Two Brothers Cut from Stars
Animals
Postwar: Apiary, Aviary
Snuff Film
Commuter
I Bought Her a Bird
Heartland Wilds
The Water is the Last Thing
The Man with a Fish in his Heart
Sister
Killing Square
Baby
Heartland Calamitous
Postwar: Lake Michigan
Redbird
Pines
Heartland Aquatic
This Boy Here. He Will Kill You.
My Mother Took to Keeping Tigers
Postwar: Heartland
I Am the Heaviest Feeling Man on the Planet
Love to a Monster
A Black Eye. A Drowned Eye.
Two Brothers Cut from Stars
Animals
Postwar: Apiary, Aviary
Snuff Film
Commuter
I Bought Her a Bird
Heartland Wilds
The Water is the Last Thing
The Man with a Fish in his Heart
Be the first to know
Get the latest updates on new releases, special offers, and media highlights when you subscribe to our email lists!