Author El. T. Fullah’s KALI MA is a collection of short, sharp flash fiction stories (none are longer than a few hundred words) that are laser-focused on a specific concept, often leading to a twist-style ending. The collection opens with “The Violinist,” in which a masterful musician goads his adoring audience to horrifying acts in order to prove their devotion to him, setting the fairly grim tone of the rest of the stories. In one, a man who makes snuff films for his own pleasure and artistic fulfillment—his heart rate never rising despite the violence and cruelty of his “art”—accepts his first commission, leading to his doom. In another, vampires descend on a small town in New Hampshire in order to manufacture an opioid crisis, for some reason.
Fullah is often starkly political, as in “The Politician,” in which a conservative politician celebrates the Supreme Court’s decision striking down abortion rights, educating his daughter on White Replacement Theory to stem her objections. Sometimes he simply explores a concept, as he does in “I’m Going to Rob You,” in which the unnamed narrator explains how they could prey upon you if they wished. All of these stories race towards a twisty ending—the author leaves little time for setting, character, or other subtleties—they establish a bare-bones scenario, run through the basics, and then detonate their payload at the end. If it lands—as it does in “An Act of Intimacy,” wherein a married couple discover a surprising shared desire—the story works. But when the idea isn’t so new or interesting, as in one tale that trades on the ancient concept of extremely religious people unwittingly winding up in hell, they fall flat because there’s not much else to the story beyond the idea.
There are some standouts in terms of those ideas, such as “Across the Universe”, about an astronomer who begins trading music with a quickly-approaching alien presence, or the story about a man who enters an afterlife populated by his forebears (“Ancestors”), much to his regret. But because these stories do have interesting premises, they leave the reader wanting more. These are rich concepts that could be explored more deeply instead of tossed off as they race towards the twist.
El. T. Fullah writes with confidence and overall the stories in KALI MA are entertaining and show great potential, but this flash fiction is impatient to get to the punchline, and sometimes those punchlines aren’t worth the rush.
~Jeff Somers for IndieReader