It’s been three years since I stopped publishing “fictional interludes” on a monthly basis, and more than six years since I stopped doing “My Favorite __________” columns. And yet last week I started deeply missing that feature, and wishing that I could produce them as often as I used to. That mood inspired me to pull out my own copies of Ladies of the Night and The Forms of Things Unknown, browse through them, and reread a few of them, and that in turn inspired me to make a list of my own favorites from both collections (and a couple which will be included in my next collection, Lost Angels, which I’ll probably compile in another year or so). So without further ado (except to encourage you to support my work by buying them if you don’t already own them, and reviewing them if you like them), I hereby present my own personal top 10, in order of publication, with a short comment on each.
Perceptive readers have certainly noticed my love of mythology in general and Greek mythology in particular; a number of my stories have themes, titles, settings or characters borrowed from it. This one has only the last, and yet its title is scriptural and its themes eternal. And its Southern Gothic setting is, in many ways, one that fits the character almost as well as the one she’s usually associated with.
2) Bad News 
While it’s not uncommon for my stories to feature dry humor, I have difficulty performing this one at book readings without giggling. Even if I were restricted to five selections, I think this one would still make the cut.
As befits a Christmas story, this is certainly the lightest, most sentimental, and most optimistic tale on this list. And the protagonist is one of my favorite characters I’ve ever (literally) dreamed up, partly because rather than being a goddess, witch, villainess or femme fatale, she’s just an escort of rather nervous temperament who finds herself in well over her head.
4) Rose 
This isn’t my only story which treats seriously a topic I usually make fun of in my non-fiction, nor my only story based on a poem, nor the only one featuring very dark humor. And did I ever tell you that the unreliable narrator is one of my favorite literary devices? Because it is. Read this one
and maybe you’ll understand why.
5) Millennium
A tale of First Contact seen through an extremely cynical lens. You’ve probably never seen aliens portrayed quite like this before, and the fact that you probably haven’t may tell you just how cynical.
I’m not really very good with pastiche; the only author whose style I can reasonably approximate is Maggie McNeill. And that’s probably why I like this one so much; it reads very much like a pulp tale from the 1930s, and the characters and dialog are, in my own admittedly-biased opinion, some of the best I ever wrote.
I’ve written scarier things than this, and more personal things than this, but none both scarier and more personal. And I still don’t like thinking about it when I’m alone late at night.
8) Lost Angel
This is not a tale of horror, at least not the usual kind of horror;
it is, in fact, pretty squarely in the genre generally known as “science fiction”. Nobody dies violently or suffers some other awful fate…so why do I always experience a pronounced frisson when thinking about the ending?
Many of the stories in The Forms of Things Unknown are, in a way, autobiographical, but none more so than this one.
It’s about love, trust and other scary things, but it can’t possibly scare you as much as it scares me because I know what it all means. I still think you’ll enjoy it.
10) Wheels
While “Trust Exercise” is a scary story about love, it’s not the love that’s scary; that is definitely not true in “Wheels”, the distillation of some themes that have haunted me for almost four decades and finally demanded I explore them in a more traditional narrative form.
