A review of my debut collection in Story Magazine

What a delight this is: A review of The Bedtime Emptying of Our World from Jaime Goh at Story Magazine. There’s also a quite extensive interview in which Jaime and I talk about constraints, characters, dread, and I brain-dump all my favorite fairy-tale scholarship and stories from my time at Fairy Tale Review.

As I said on Bluesky, I never thought I’d see someone engage so deeply with my writing.

Some of my favorite moments in the review:

In “Cardinine, Seafoamyst, Morningite,” a parent watches their son gradually turn to stone, using the cold language of geology to describe the whole haunting process. To memorialize, these stories seem to posit, is to participate in transformation.

That same logic of unstable preservation crystallizes through the book’s recurring focus on guardians and their wards, as Hans repeatedly situates these relationships within systems that complicate care.

The stories may draw from the structures of folklore and fairy tales, but they’re far less interested in nostalgia than in testing what those narrative systems can still hold. Buoyed by Hans’s precise and imagistic prose, the separation between feeling and form keeps these stories from resolving too neatly into sentiment.

I thought the final line of “Once, the Sound Dad and I Loved Most” beautifully captures a revelation so many experience at some point in their lives: “I reached up to rest my hand on Dad’s shoulder, but instead found him below me, his lips still stained with cardinal, straining up to grasp me once more before I grew away.” It’s that moment you realize the person who once anchored your world is now the one trying to keep up with it. That moment you realize it’s time to let go.

And, finally:

If you’re looking to be transported to worlds where setting is more than scenery and narrative logic feels like a living force, The Bedtime Emptying of Our World delivers with confidence. Hans attends to how people acclimate to conditions that don’t care about them, and even more to what that acclimation costs.

I hope you’ll want to be transported (aka, buy a copy).