Raymond Brunell writes literary horror, dark magical realism, and
speculative fiction from the post-industrial Upper Peninsula of
Michigan, a country of shuttered mills and half-emptied company towns
he treats as unclaimed literary territory. His stories return to the
quiet cruelty of institutions (the case files, denial letters, and
diagnostic codes that decide who counts) and to the inherited grief
that outlasts the buildings where it was first filed away.
Neurodivergent narrators recur throughout, their uncanny perception a
way of seeing machinery everyone else has learned not to notice.
His short fiction has appeared in forty-nine journals and
anthologies, including Necessary Fiction, River & South Review, Across the Margin, Bowery Gothic, Horrific Scribblings, and
Flash Fiction Magazine. It has been longlisted four times for Furious
Fiction from the Australian Writers’ Centre, including a place in
the contest’s monthly story showcase. L. Andrew Cooper, publisher of
Horrific Scribes, wrote that the title story of his collection
No Exceptions makes him “a worthy heir” to Kafka, and
talked with him at length
about the book’s bureaucratic dread.
He counts Shirley Jackson and Carmen Maria Machado among his clearest
influences and, like them, is drawn to domestic and bureaucratic
spaces that curdle without warning: a waiting room, a form, a hallway
that keeps rearranging itself. He came to fiction later in life, after
a long career inside large systems, long enough to become fluent in
their language and to learn what that fluency costs. He lives in the
Upper Peninsula with his wife and daughter.
Brunell is an MFA candidate in creative writing at Southern New
Hampshire University, where he is completing his thesis novel,
Caving Grounds. His story collection No Exceptions and
his novel The Fifteenth Station are seeking publishers. He has
also independently published sixteen books, including the
speculative series
The Archive Wars,
The Memory Keepers, and
The Algorithmic Awakening.
He welcomes
contact
from readers, editors, and agents, especially those who share his
interest in the horror of being unsortable.
