States of Grace: Stories

by Stephen Graham Jones

204 pages, Paperback

Published December 9, 2025

About the author

Stephen Graham Jones is the NYT bestselling author thirty-five or so books. He really likes werewolves and slashers. Favorite novels change daily, but Valis and Love Medicine and Lonesome Dove and It and The Things They Carried are all usually up there somewhere. Stephen lives in Boulder, Colorado. It's a big change from the West Texas he grew up in.

Reviews

[Lorin (paperbackbish) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Flash fiction is my fave—so many characters and stories in my head now after reading just one small book.

My favorite stories:
The Lepidopterists
So This Is What It’s Like
Thirsty
Truth Is a Bearded Lady
‘Tis the Season
The Umbrella Tree
Kiss the Chef

Plus the ending lines of Seafood, Bulletproof, The Hypocrite, The Bridge, and Stephen’s introduction.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

[D.S. LaLonde · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t generally read much flash fiction since it only sometimes clicks for me. But I greatly enjoyed this collection. A majority of these pieces work really well, striking just the right emotional chords, being both impactful and thought provoking. Two standouts for me were The Umbrella Tree and The Real Batman Story.

[Ande · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I write because, for a few pages at a time, I can make the world make sense.”

4.00 / 5.00

States of Grace is a collection of Stephen Graham Jones’s flash fiction work, recently updated and re-released with 10 additional stories. All stories fall into the horror spectrum.

I am going to preface this review by saying I don’t really care for flash fiction. I like the world-building aspect of books - stepping into a world that’s similar to but not quite our own, or even vastly different from anything we’d find here. In that aspect, flash fiction is usually pretty boring to me. This was an extra in my December 2025 Night Worms subscription box, and it’s by one of my favorite authors, so I was very excited to read it. I didn’t know it was flash fiction until I started reading. I probably wouldn’t have sought this book out on my own.

Surprisingly, I liked a good number of the stories in this collection, but I didn’t really get the point of many of them. Flash fiction tends to go over my head sometimes with the “get to the point as quickly as possible” aspect. Quick trigger warning that there is a fair amount of body horror mixed into this collection.

I will say, out of all the collections of flash fiction I’ve read, this has been my favorite.

Since there’s not any recurring characters or themes and since there are more than 50 vastly different stories in this collection, I will not be picking a song to represent this book.

[bookcookery]

While it’s wonderful to see how vividly Stephen Graham Jones can paint a world with just a paragraph and impressive how many ideas teem inside his brain, some of these images will remain seared in mine, making it even harder to interact with (and certainly eat with) other humans.