I stand at the back window and a smoking tube hangs over downtown, raw and impossible. Millie zips her coat and says we need dog food. My phone pings: another woman taken, executed on a boulevard twenty minutes from us.
The grocery store lights stayed on as if nothing had changed. A Terrifying Invasion Feels Eerily Familiar in J.R. Dawson’s Hell is Empty
I’ll speak plainly: this short story lands because it refuses the obvious theatrics and trusts small human details to do the heavy lifting. You and I both know how headlines hijack our attention; Dawson uses that hijack against us, forcing the calm mundanity of errands and gyms to become the scaffolding for dread.
I read the story the way I watch traffic when a siren slices the night—alert, impatient, waiting for the next fracture. Millie’s pragmatism (“We need dog food”) is not comic relief. It’s a centrifugal force that keeps the world spinning while everything worth losing dangles above us.
What is ‘Hell is Empty’ about?
Short answer: a city is hollowed out by an otherworldly rupture and ordinary life keeps functioning in brittle ways. Dawson stages a deliberate tension between spectacle and routine: a hellmouth, devils, and news anchors who cheer about economic growth while people get torn from cars. That tension is where the story’s pulse lives.
As your guide through this piece, I want you to feel the emotional architecture Dawson builds. Attention hooks are planted by blunt images—an open throat of earth, a windshield shredded—and then curiosity loops close slowly: who made the deal below? Why are poets the first victims? The loops keep you reading because they promise answers you don’t yet have.
There are two precise levers the story pulls on your nervous system. First, fear of loss: we get micro-inventories—dog food, gym routines, neighbor favors—so when the sky goes black those inventories become casualty lists in miniature. Second, moral authority: Millie’s small acts of care—texting neighbors, delivering burgers—convert ordinary kindness into resistance. That gives you someone to root for without turning the narrative into cheap heroics.
Where can I read ‘Hell is Empty’ by J.R. Dawson?
You can read the story right here on Movies & TV as part of a Lightspeed Magazine feature. If you want the whole April issue, the ebook is priced at $4.99 (€4.60). Lightspeed’s feeds and Movies & TV’s coverage are the platforms moving this work into conversations on Twitter and author feeds.
When I analyze why the story stays with me, I treat it like a case study in tone control. The narrator’s voice is flat but intimate: “We’re okay” becomes a mantra that both calms and sets off alarms. That split—comfort and alarm—creates momentum language without shouting. Your chest tightens not because the prose screams, but because it refuses to soothe you fully.
The image that haunts the piece is elemental: the hellmouth is a bleeding throat over the city. That single metaphor replaces pages of blood-and-thunder description and keeps the image stuck in your head while the human scenes do the emotional work.
The gym TVs kept playing as if it were a normal afternoon. How the story uses the ordinary to amplify the extraordinary
Consider how the story treats screens. TVs show anchors smiling; phones ping with execution notices. Dawson mines modern media ecosystems—Google alerts, news chyron logic, social feeds—to create an ecosystem where information itself becomes a threat. You recognize the pattern because it belongs to our real feeds.
Authority cues are sprinkled in small places: a mention of Purina dog chow, a Drexel MFA, the logistics of supply chains. Those references are not product placement; they are anchor points that make the supernatural feel municipal, almost administrative. That, in turn, heightens dread because what’s impossible is treated like a public works problem.
If you’re paying attention to pacing, notice how the story staggers shocks. A black sky, a vanished woman, then a return to chicken noodle soup. Those reversals force you to live in the same mood toggles the characters inhabit: terror, domesticity, a thin, exhausted resilience.
On the craft side, the narrator uses a promise technique: small promises (we’ll get dog food; we’ll check on neighbors) compound into a narrative ethic. That ethic teaches you how to read the story—watch the small obligations; they are where salvation and failure will be measured.
Fear, in Dawson’s hands, is a live wire under your skin. This second metaphor is the emotional engine: it describes not what fear looks like, but what it does—making you twitchy, precise, and ready to act in ways that are achingly ordinary.
Is this story scary if I’m used to big horror set pieces?
Yes, because it refuses the expected beats. There are no sweeping exorcisms, no final confrontations. Horror here is a slow abrasion. If you prefer works that favor atmosphere and social observation—say, the quiet dread of certain Black Mirror episodes—you’ll find Dawson’s approach effective.
And if you want to trace influence, the Shakespearean epigraph—“Hell is empty, and all the devils are here”—is a neat authority cue that lets the story sit in a literary conversation while also pointing to how myth is repurposed into municipal crisis.
The author bio sits at the end like a credit roll. About J.R. Dawson and where else to find their work
J.R. Dawson (she/they) writes sharp, human-focused speculative fiction. Their Golden Crown–winning novel The First Bright Thing and other short work appear in F&SF, Uncanny, and Reactor. Dawson teaches in Drexel University’s MFA program and lives in Minnesota with a wife and three dogs.
If you want to keep following this kind of work, follow Lightspeed Magazine and Movies & TV on social platforms and check author feeds on Twitter and author pages for readings and links to the full April issue. Will you let the small, ferocious acts in this story guide how you act on the next alarming headline?