SmokeLong Quarterly

Reviewed by Gillian O’Shaughnessy

In the opening story of Claudia Monpere’s transformative new collection, The Periodic Family: Stories [Cowboy Jamboree Press, Oct 13, 2026], we meet a forty-year-old pregnant woman who is wracked with exhaustion and nausea. Her husband grows increasingly irritated with her fixation on the sun. She recites facts about its weight, its heat. She is obsessed with the star’s indifferent violence, the inevitability of its implosion. All the while, he tries to change the subject. We only glimpse her guilt and fear when she’s ill and alone on the bathroom floor and speaks her most secret truth to the diminutive life she carries inside her, “Baby. Oh Baby. Baby, Baby. You’re right not to trust me.”

“Solar Flare,” originally published in Atlas and Alice and named winner of the SmokeLong Quarterly 2024 Workshop Prize, illustrates Monpere’s writing at its most chilling and unsettling. It’s a sign of what’s to come.

Like the periodic table invoked in the title, Monpere searches for meaning in the building blocks of life. Her focus is the rituals, tensions and negotiations that hold families together. Reading this collection, I also found myself thinking about the James Webb Space Telescope, launched–incidentally–on Christmas Day, one of those occasions that carries the weight of our familial expectations, yet so often simmers with tension and trauma. Monpere works in a similar telescopic space. She takes what we think we know about families and illuminates them in startling new detail. Drawing on the language of astronomy and chemistry, Monpere builds a constellation of sixty stories that continually shift between the microscopic and the immense, the domestic and the cosmic.

Flash fiction is often associated with a single moment. Monpere certainly works with micro detail, but she also understands the power of expansion. By twisting her lens this way and that, zooming in or out, she reveals the forces operating within familial structures–volatile, radiant and radioactive. Love, grief, guilt, rage, resilience–she gathers emotions like elements in a periodic chart to find patterns in emotional chaos.

The story “Jeopardy” unfolds at a family reunion that begins happily enough. Old photographs clipped to a string. Fairy lights. Children leaping on a bouncy castle. But the cracks soon appear. By the time the trivia begins, our narrator has been liberally dropping Xanax, and a game that starts as fun eventually exposes family secrets once thought safely hidden. It’s funny, until it isn’t.

Monpere’s collection is divided into three sections: Erosions, Covalent Bonds and The Sprawling Existence. I confess I had to look up the meaning of a covalent bond. I skirted through science at school and spent most of my chemistry classes smoking behind the gym. Covalent bonds are formed when atoms share electrons in order to gain stability. There are bonding pairs and lone pairs. You don’t need a passing grade in science to appreciate the metaphors Monpere is working with here. Her characters are caught up in social systems that determine whether they bond, how they bond and with whom.

In the title story of the collection, “The Periodic Family,” members of a household are literally reimagined as elements on the periodic table. The mother is thirteen billion years old, roughly the age of the universe. Once helium hydride, now hydrogen, she endlessly seeks to bond with everything around her, compelled to sustain others without concern for her own desires. The father is polonium, rare and quietly lethal: “He thinks his silvery gray appearance makes him look distinguished and benign…Just one gram of Po-210 can kill 10 million people. Like his atomic number, there are 84 ways he destroys.”

Mothers and daughters, in particular, provide a pressure chamber for Monpere’s sharp observations. The relationship is examined again and again with the focus of a telescope trained on a distant star. In Monpere’s hands, families rarely function as stable units, more akin to chemical reactions. Unstable and lethal fathers. Mothers who attempt to hold everything together through gravitational force. Children orbiting uncertainly between them, “…everything has an electric charge, attracting or repelling. Neutral is a myth.”

Monpere does not shy away from the dark matter of abuse, mental illness, loss and suicide, but within the darkness there is also color and play. We encounter a six-inch cheerleader who leaps from a box waving pompoms, a catalogue of Barbie outfits. Characters search for joy by renaming themselves “Peaches.” Ghosts appear who mend the roof and move like “pastel watercolors.” Darkness and light coexist, reflecting the universal truth that both are inextricably part of the same cosmic arena.

Monpere moves easily between form: traditional flash, hybrid pieces, lists and prose poems. Individually, each of these stories carries its own weight. When read together, they accumulate into something almost mystical despite their scientific motifs. Monpere is an award-winning flash writer, and her mastery of compression and implication is clear in each of these works.

The Periodic Family: Stories is an ambitious and dazzling collection. This book offers profound observations on the forces that shape family life. They are as powerful and intricate as the forces that structure the universe. When devotion and damage are equally rendered in elemental terms, the volatile energies that shape our lives are revealed with both devastation and wonder.

The Periodic Family: Stories is available on October 13, 2026 in ebook and print through Amazon.

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Gillian O’Shaughnessy is a journalist, facilitator and author from Walyalup, Fremantle. She spent 25 years with the ABC, as a presenter and reporter with News and Current Affairs and Local Radio. Her short fiction has been widely anthologized and selected for the international Best Small Fictions in 2023–2025. She is a submissions editor for SmokeLong Quarterly. Gillian is a highly experienced moderator and interviewer, specializing in literature. She has curated Writers Weekend for the Festival of Perth and was a judge of the 2026 Australian Stella Prize for Women and Non Binary writers. Salt City Runaway is her first book, published by Night Parrot Press.

Claudia Monpere lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her flash fiction appears in SmokeLong Quarterly, Split Lip, Trampset, Flash Frog, and elsewhere. She won the 2023 SmokeLong Workshop Prize, the 2024 New Flash Fiction Prize from New Flash Fiction Review, and the 2024 Genre Flash Fiction Prize from Uncharted Magazine. She has stories in Best Small Fictions 2024 and 2025 and Best Microfiction 2025 and 2026.