Limelight and Other Stories Reviewed by Maddie Erb
The best work in Limelight and Other Stories by Lyndsey Croal (Shortwave Publishing) is viscerally unsettling, like the author is pressing her fingers into an open wound.
Years ago, when Netflix’s Black Mirror first became a cultural phenomenon, I devoured the episodes. They were gripping and narratively satisfying, but they scared me only in brief flashes. It was an exhilarating, unserious diversion.I read all the internet criticisms (every episode is just “what if technology went wrong!”), and to some extent, I agreed.
Lyndsey Croal’s short story collection Limelight and Other Stories, from Shortwave Publishing, bears more than a cursory resemblance to Black Mirror, but the fear and emotional bite in these stories sinks into my bones in a way the show didn’t. These days, we don’t need to rely on fiction to feel a sense of foreboding, but the anxiety these stories stirred up was not merely my own unease, but a reflection of the sharp, emotional writing.
The collection is divided into two sections, depicting the near future and the far future. Croal does not pull punches. From the very first story, I was hooked, and more than a little unsettled.
The opening story, “Patchwork Girls,” reminiscent of HBO’s Westworld, hit me hardest. The narrator is an android built for the entertainment industry, who routinely endures violence and even death for movies and plays. Like all the best fiction, it contains a grain of disturbing truth. It captures the savagery within Hollywood’s machinery that takes pleasure in watching women suffer.
In “Better Self,” a woman’s employer implants retinal devices that bombard her with weight-loss propaganda. It’s a premise just out of reach—but only just. The real horror lies in how closely it mirrors the world we already inhabit. Croal skillfully depicts a consumerist horrorscape where a “better self” can be purchased. It’s easy to imagine the Musks and Bezoses of the world thriving in that kind of reality.
The titular novelette, “Limelight,” follows a young woman brought back from the dead and modified by her parents into a perfect version of her former self. The emotional foundation feels grounded and painfully relatable. Croal deftly evokes the feeling of being warped by someone else’s vision of who you should be.
Limelight and Other Stories seemed frontloaded—the material that affected me most deeply lies in the first half. The first section is brutal. I took a strange comfort in the second section —it allowed me to catch my breath a little.
While the collection is threaded with eerie, unsettling themes, it offers plenty of variety in form and tone. Each story feels distinct. Readers should find it accessible, even those who aren’t science fiction aficionados. The writing is clear, and never bogged down by the kind of technical detail that can make science fiction feel alienating.
Fragments of these stories will rattle around in my mind for a long time.
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Maddie Erb is a writer and editor currently living in Charleston SC. She just graduated from the College of Charleston with a B.A. in English. Maddie likes to consider herself creatively omnivorous—she likes to write in as many mediums as she can get her grubby little hands on. You can find her on bluesky at mkellygames.bsky.social, on itch at mkellygames, and at her website, madelineerb.com.