No Substance #181: ‘Exit Interview’ out now in Lightspeed

I’ve a new story out in the latest issue of Lightspeed called ‘Exit Interview’. It’s told in the form of an exit interview, one of those standard ones with check boxes and questions that you’d really not answer as you leave your job. But in this case, that’s okay. Our narrator wants to tell her former employer what she thinks.

It’ll be free to read on the thirteenth of this month. If you want to read it before then, you can buy the issue, or get a subscription. Lightspeed is a good magazine, and like all good magazines who publish short fiction in the current climate, your support is appreciated.

‘Exit Interview’ is a Ministry story. It is the fourth to be published, following on from ‘See You On A Dark Night’, ‘At the Periphery’, and ‘The Ministry of Saturn’. That’s not a reading order, just the order that they’ve been published in, and you should feel free to read them in any way you wish, if you wish. I’ve a couple more pieces I’m working on, so with any luck, there’ll be some more. After a while, I guess an order will present itself, but until then, do as you please.

Ministry stories are about a world where the borders between different worlds are breaking down, and other people and creatures and monsters are coming through. Mostly, they’re doing so to find a better life. The Ministry of Saturn is a self appointed group of people who want to police, capture, and kill those who come through. As an organisation they’re governed by fear and greed, organised by ignorance and distrust, and are ethically bankrupt. Unsurprising, they’re a terrible organisation to work for.

Ministry stories have just kind of crept up on me, I’ll admit. I never planned to write a set of stories about traditional monsters, I just sort of found myself doing so. The first story I wrote, ‘See You On A Dark Night’, was about a vampire whose friend, a vampire hunter, has recently died. He doesn’t know how to deal with the grief of that and the story unfolds from there. In that story, I decided that the monster hunting society, the self appointed police of this world, should be inept and harmful. That in itself isn’t an original idea, but quite often the stories about those organisations are often told by employees who do good work, or who somehow save the company, or attempt to do so and thus make it better and somehow worthwhile. I’m not interested in doing that, myself. The Ministry is a broken organisation. It does more harm than good. The stories are, to a degree, about me counting the ways.

The Ministry is only sometimes at the centre of a story. Sometimes they are, like with ‘Exit Interview’, but other times they lurk on the edges, barely mentioned or not at all. After a while, I guess, we’ll see if I picked a good title to group the pieces under. You never know, I might have.

At any rate, please enjoy the piece.

Ben

(Ben Peek is the author of eight books including The Godless, Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, and Dead Americans and Other Stories. His ninth book will be The Red Labyrinth. His short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Nightmare, Polyphony, and Overland, as well as various Year’s Best Books. He’s the creator of the psychogeography ‘zine The Urban Sprawl Project. He also wrote an autobiographical comic called Nowhere Near Savannah, illustrated by Anna Brown. He lives in Sydney, Australia.)