Magic Can’t Save Us: Eighteen Tales of Likely Failure

Many relationships are doomed from the start. But what if there was a way to save them? The characters in Magic Can’t Save Us think they may have the answers--why visit a human counselor when you could spend the night in a house haunted by a poltergeist that specializes in couples therapy? Others are ready to call it quits, like the pair that’s torn apart, literally, by a bevy of belligerent harpies. Meanwhile, a scorned woman hires a dragon to guard her house from her cheating mate, a couple tries to combat the inertia of their marriage through the revitalizing charms of unicorn meat, and a centaur seduces a luckless man’s girlfriend over a series of conference calls. In these eighteen tales of likely failure, when a magical creature shows up, you know things are only going to get worse from there.

Subverting the all-too-real emotions of romantic relationships with humor and iconoclastic takes on classic fantastical beings, Magic Can’t Save Us makes us rethink the choices we have made in order to ask a harrowingly human question: Just what does it take to redeem a relationship?

Josh Denslow is the author of Not Everyone Is Special (7.13 Books), Super Normal (Stillhouse Press), and the upcoming collection Magic Can’t Save Us (UNO Press). His most recent short stories have appeared in Electric Literature’s The Commuter, The Rumpus, and Okay Donkey, among others. He is the Email Marketing Manager for Bookshop.org, and he has read and edited for SmokeLong Quarterly for over a decade. He currently lives in Barcelona with his family.