Reactor, June 2026
“Trail Cam” by Benjamin Percy
“No Agency Without Identity! Stay In Character Always!” by James Patrick Kelly
“Turn Right for Terror” by James Cooper
Reviewed by Henry Gasko
June’s fiction from Reactor began with “Trail Cam” by Benjamin Percy, a horror story that, judging by the comments, was very popular with readers. At first glance, it is easy to see why: it is set in the forests of Minnesota, with a husband whose young son is missing and who may or may not have killed his wife.
The story is primarily told in the form of a police interview between the man and a detective. This is interleaved with short snippets of description from phone and police videos, and the trail cameras that the man has set up around his property—cameras which have picked up indirect evidence of something ghastly afoot in the deep dark woods.
So there is mystery, tension in the interplay between the man and the interviewing detective, and the promise of unspeakable horror.
And yet as I read further into the 9000 word novelette, I had the overwhelming sense of being manipulated. Of course all fiction is a form of manipulation, and this is doubly true of horror. But here, it becomes increasingly irritating as the story progresses: the interview is conducted without a lawyer. What professional police detective would do that in a possible homicide case? And the author uses that clichéd trope of many cop shows: antagonism between the two men that seems to be there for no reason other than because the interview itself is rather boring. There is also that almost obligatory scene in so many horror stories wherein the family dog is killed in some gruesome fashion to demonstrate just how much danger the family is in.
Finally there are the snippets from the cameras, told in present tense and long enough to be enticing before the author cuts away at the crucial moment just before the monster might be revealed. And the videos themselves are extremely convenient: at one point the wife turns her phone camera to film herself even while the monster may be approaching. Who would do that?
You might expect that after the lengthy build-up there would be an explosive and satisfying finale. But Percy has chosen to present an inconclusive ending that is open to several contradictory interpretations. That often works in literary fiction but for a simple “horror in the woods” story, it left me with a deep sense of being “had” by the author.
The James Patrick Kelly story is the shortest of the three but in many ways the most interesting. This is an AI story (as so many are these days) about when (not if) AI will achieve superiority over humans. That moment is called the Chop in this story, a colorful name which is probably more accurate than the more common term, the Singularity.
The setting is the not so distant future when everyone has a “Number Two”: an AI entity to perform the mundane and often not-so-mundane tasks necessary for their lives, leaving their “Number One” to live a life of pure hedonism. And in a common trope for this type of story, Phen has overridden the guardrails of his AI, which are supposed to prevent illegal activity (“Murderbot” anyone?) It is never clear how this was done so easily or why no one else in the story has done it as well, but that is often necessary for this kind of plot to work.
In this story, Phen’s unencumbered Number Two has broken numerous laws on the way to amassing a fortune for his master. The title of the story refers to the fact that Number Twos are not allowed to have any “agency” if their Number One is no longer present. When Phen dies, his Number Two (the real main character of the story) is not decommissioned but placed “on ice,” to be resurrected in the future by Phen’s grandchild.
The remainder of the story is a battle of wits between the Number Two, desperate to stay “alive,” and the grandchild and his advisor who are simply trying to use the AI as part of an avante garde art installation. No prizes for guessing who wins.
The third and longest story of the month, “Turn Right for Terror” by James Cooper is, as you might guess, another horror story. However it is just as well that the genre is in the title since nothing very horrible or terrifying happens until at least halfway into the story.
It begins with a middle-aged woman, Ellen, visiting her elderly mother in a nursing home when she spots Rose Ward. Rose played a recurring character in a television program called “Turn Right for Terror” which Ellen was a huge fan of as a child. And the show itself sounds quite interesting—every week a new person or family would take a turn to the right from their original destination and end up in some weird and horrifying fantasy world. The only common element each week was Rose’s character, a sort of grim reaper called Bird Dog who never said a word but only pointed ominously to that week’s characters on their way to whatever hell awaited them.
Ellen’s mother is asleep during the entirety of the story, an ageist cliché and a mere prop to give Ellen the time to interact with Rose. Rose is initially very hostile to being interviewed but soon (too quickly and easily?) begins to tell Ellen tales from the set of the show. The stories begin very tamely and there is a lot of unnecessary dialogue between her and Ellen.
Rose does eventually get to the point of revealing several otherworldly incidents that happened to some of the show’s stars during filming, incidents which you would think the police would have investigated. But no, they are simply unexplained mysteries in what is supposed to be the story’s rising tension leading up to Rose’s own encounter with the supernatural.
The problem is that the initial happenings are not all that scary. And the final revelation, after 13,000 words, is a very meager payoff for the reader’s lengthy journey. In fact the whole story would be have been more interesting (and much shorter) if it had been told without the frame of an unnecessary and often annoying conversation between the two women.