Review by Edith-Nicole Cameron
In “A Safe Haven for Writers,” the fifth story in Brittany Micka-Foos’s debut collection, This Isn’t Fun Anymore, the narrator enrolls in a writing retreat. While there, she intends to show her husband that she’s capable of meeting her own needs, and work on “a collection of domestic horror stories. Stories of what’s just beneath the surface” (71). Before reading Micka-Foos’s book, the “domestic horror” genre was not on my radar. But as soon as I saw that phrase, I realized I’d just finished four stories falling squarely within its contours.
This Isn’t Fun Anymore is slim enough to enjoy in one go, but I found its eight short stories worth savoring. Micka-Foos’s prose is hilarious, atmospheric, and dense in both content and concept: throughout the book, she elucidates without euphemism the endless ways in which the world, for women, comes with serrated edges. In sometimes as few as four pages, her slice-of-life stories speak volumes about the mental spiral of maternity, the loss of identity after a betrayal, and the complicated embodiment of trauma. And while these topics aren’t uncharted territory, Micka-Foos serves them up fresh, piled thick and hot on a creepy funhouse platter that had me dreading a jump-scare. Welcome to domestic horror, where protagonists grapple with the soul-crushing, anxiety-inducing reality that danger is always just around the corner.
The book’s stories are independent in plot and character, but thematically tied: the world is a perilous place, and our minds cannot bear the toll of that truth unscathed.
In the first story, once her daughter starts kindergarten, Leah finds herself with too many empty hours in a too-empty house. Her novel-in-progress isn’t progressing, and instead of writing, she reads self-help books, compulsively. She’s particularly lured by Magical Womanhood: The Subdued Power of the Feminine. On the same day a 7-year-old girl goes missing in their community, Leah convinces her begrudging husband to conduct their household according to the book’s archaically-gendered tenets, so she can write her own bestseller about their experience. We learn from “The Experiment” that safety is never guaranteed, even at home.
The book’s title story introduces us to Mel, once-darling of the anime convention, the “she-devil” sporting a sword and a metal bikini. Three years later, she returns to Tanoshii Con, this time with her one-year-old daughter. As breastmilk leaks in her corset, her scalp itches under her wig, and she plans her day around the baby’s nap schedule, Mel feels out of place. From this new parent angle, Mel confronts the darker sides of the conference, the threat of violence pulsing beneath what she once deemed “hypnotic, honest fun” (33).
In “Safe Haven,” immediately upon the narrator’s arrival at a retreat center, its strangeness overwhelms her. Salt House – a character in its own right – is dilapidated, thin-walled, and entirely devoid of door locks and window coverings. The center’s caretaker, Paul, is omnipresent and menacing. His morning routine invariably coincides with the narrator’s; he wields chainsaws and machetes every time she sees him; and the soundtrack of his pedophilic porn wakes her up at night. When the narrator describes Paul’s unnerving aura to her husband, he’s dismissive: “You see the sinister in everything. … Not everything is a horror story. Not everything is some awful conspiracy” (80). In “Safe Haven,” as in several stories in the collection, domestic horror feels eerily like real life. From every direction, patriarchal norms keep women on high alert.
The book also wrestles with the threats hiding inside women. “From The Waist Down” considers the bond formed between a woman and the abnormal mass on her uterus. Is the growth an invasion, or the material manifestation of her own rage? In “The New Jenny,” after her husband leaves her for his personal trainer, Jenny’s general skittishness skyrockets. Then she purchases a handgun. New Jenny is confident, plucky. New Jenny can protect herself – but her metamorphosis might come with a public safety risk.
Where craft is concerned, This Isn’t Fun Anymore checks all the boxes. Every story starts out with a hook. (“We’re in the hospital again, me and my wayward womb” (39). “Jenny Rench was 36 when she decided she needed a weapon” (53).) Plots hinge on the uncanny tension between ridiculous and real. I often experienced a meta-layer of domestic horror when I saw myself in her unraveling characters. (“How could she explain the whole of it? The shameful need to feel in control of something. Anything” (4).)
What I most admired were the stories’ endings. After a plot’s worth of nail-biting, that most terrible thing never actually happens. Peril stays at the periphery: assaults are historic, murders a few doors down. And this works because, ultimately, the book is about women enduring the relentless fear of harm, fueled by our knowing that everything happens. Children are raped. Women are battered. Men betray and belittle. Unwelcome cells proliferate inside our organs. In Micka-Foos’s stories, the characters’ semi-safe landings don’t offer relief. They offer reality – terrifying and unresolved, braced for the next hazard.
It’s No Fun Anymore by Brittany Micka-Foos
Apprentice House Press, 2025, 109 pages, $16.99 [paper]
ISBN 9781627205856
Edith-Nicole Cameron (she/they) reads, writes, and mothers in Minneapolis. Her poetry, essays, and short fiction appear in various journals, including Literary Mama and River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, and on her Substack: Writing it Out.