A Visitor Kills Me

A Visitor Kills Me is a cabinet of violent curiosities, an album of stark incidents that are difficult to read, not because they are demanding, but because they seduce readers to stop and ponder the associations they conjure. The sheer beauty of these minimal stories is breathtaking, and together offer a penetrating gaze into some of the darker corners of life.

-Steve Tomasula

Blessed and burdened with uncanny perception, the speakers in Steve Owen's marvelously strange fictions expose the exhilarating possibilities and dangerously seductive rapture of shared consciousness and radical empathy. They risk their lives hoping to nuture the humanseed in the discarded and despised, the volatile and deadly. With weird humor and hyperreal intensity, these stories deliver readers to a world where multiple iterations of a father die and die, never stopping-where a mother's detachment is a killing thing, more terrifying to a child than a violent intruder-where forsaken, self-destructive, sometimes brilliant boys in a psychiatric facility compel us to reckon with the

disturbing limits of our own humanity. -Melanie Rae Thon



BIO

Steve Owen has a PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Utah, an MFA in creative writing from Notre Dame University, and he's taught composition, literature, and creative writing for 11 years. His writing has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes (2020 and 2021), and he has received four awards for his fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. His writing investigates language's oppressive effects on cognition, empathy, and identity. His short fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and critical analysis have been published by a number of print and online journals, including: Phantom Drift, The Notre Dame Review, decomP magazinE, Otis Nebula, Quarterly West, Typehouse, Flatmancrooked's Slim Volume of Contemporary Poetics, and The Bend.