Do you know what makes a short story good? That feeling when you're done reading and it just lingers inside you.

There's a lot of that happening here with Belly Up, and it's a damn good feeling.

I'm a huge fan of quirky, weird short stories. There were some good ones in this collection, but it lacked cohesion and some stories didn't have a clear focus. There were a few stories that I ended up skimming because I just couldn't get attached to the characters or what was happening. But with some supernatural elements and magical realism, I'm still glad I decided to dive into this one.

A wonderful, almost melancholy, collection of short stories. Belly Up is well-written and impressively done, dealing with the strange in a way that makes it not so strange, but allows the reader to consider it. Delightful and weird! A wonderful debut.

This was a really strange collection of stories and I’m honestly not sure how to review it. None of them were bad, but none of them really stuck with me after I finished reading them either. Most of these were exceptionally strange, which I usually enjoy, but for the most part they didn’t feel like there was a point to them. I did end up giving this 3 stars for the few stories that I really enjoyed and that actually did stick with me.

-Décor: About a showroom receptionist who corresponds with a prison inmate.

-I found the stories revolving around the state of Florida to be entertaining with a satirical side-eye.

-What I Would Be if I Wasn’t What I Am was probably the most thoughtful piece of the collection, and I believe would resonate with anyone who has had a significant loss in their life of someone they were exceptionally tied to in some way. Physically or emotionally.

Received via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

'Things are so easy to ruin, I remember thinking. I remember thinking, why did I do that thing that I knew was going to have a bad ending?'

This is a strange, unique story collection, but not so strange to be off-putting for some. Of all the tales, Black Tongue was my favorite. There is something painfully relatable to that part of us that is pulled by things we know are just a form of sabotage, be it physical or emotional. Standing there in the aftermath of a mess we made, thinking ‘I did this to myself.” The Florida stories made me laugh, familiar with Cassadaga, the Spiritualist community, ‘psychic capital’ of the world and Gator tacos ‘tastes like chicken’ specials. Okay, so it’s a strange state and things are faded by the sun, and we are sometimes a world unto ourselves but we’re never boring.

What I Would Be If I Wasn’t What I Am is a thoughtful little piece. There are so many parts to us, made different by marriage as much as by being a parent, a sister, a friend. What is the true solid core? Because we are different for who we know, love. I’m mucking up an interesting story about a widow. Oh the strange life of cohabitation, of love. There are stories of ghosts and hired bra hands (some of us do pay outrageous prices for our brassieres, out of necessity), tricky snakes, and 24 hour donut shops where it’s okay to be an ugly teenager, who deserve love stories too.

In the South, the Sand Winds Are Our Greatest Enemy is a peculiar tale of banished brothers Gleb (the surgeon) and Oleg (the sculptor) working in a prison infirmary, full of wit and strange skills. There is nothing they can’t repair, and no one. They make great use of corpses, and outsmart the officer in control.

Stories that have an air of mystery while surrounded by the ordinary. Clever!

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Publisher: A Strange Object

Short stories are brief moments. They are often described (and I've been guilty of this myself) as 'a slice of life.' The stories in Belly Up from Rita Bullwinkel are a slice of the weird and often sad parts of life.

Each story is teetering on the edge - of sadness, of quirky, of strange, of a sense of familiar - almost like looking in a mirror at the most private of your thoughts.

Rita Bullwinkel is a writer to watch.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this book.

Short story collections are such interesting beasts. This one no exception mostly evoked a mood, but a mood that’s difficult to describe, something from a melancholy branch. The stories are diverse, but uniformly share a narrative voice that is very much authentic to their author. And it’s more or less genreless unless strange is a genre or unless it can be considered strange enough to qualify for bizarro. In fact the more bizarre ones I liked less, too…I don’t know, too scab picky of a mien somehow. But the more realistic stories were a thing of beauty, such lovely observations on versions of loneliness, which is actually sort of a general theme for this collection. Interesting, though, definitely uniformly interesting as it leaps from realism to weirdness to sheer WTFery. The story about young girls discussing cannibalism as an allegory for feminism was particularly disturbing. In fact these are all very much femalecentric stories appropriately being published by an all women small press. Much to be disquieted by in these seemingly quiet stories, not quite slices of life, but yet life was definitely being sliced here, it’s just the matter of plating and garnishes really. Original, imaginative tales, but something one must very much be in the mood for. Thanks Netgalley.

I really enjoyed this short story collection, especially "Blackened Tongue," "The Nave," and "Arms Overhead." The stories were varied but cohesive, and contained a persistent, unsettling sense of dread that I really enjoyed as a reader. Gave me a similar feel to Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado. I will definitely recommend to short fiction readers.