A short dispatch on the three ongoing serials whose next chapter I am, without embarrassment, already waiting for.
I try, as a general principle, not to write these kinds of pieces. Recommendation lists are a tricky form for a reader-first journal, they tend to overindex on the writer's enthusiasm and underindex on what the reader actually gets from them, and I prefer, on the whole, to work in longer essay forms where I can be honest about a book's limitations as well as its strengths.
But it's Thursday. Thursday is the day new chapters drop on most of the serials I follow. And I've been meaning for months to put down, in one place, the three ongoing serials I would recommend without reservation to any reader of this journal who is curious about the form. Here they are.
The one that's almost at the climax
The first serial on my list is, I'm told, within eight to twelve chapters of its conclusion. It is a long-arc dark romance that has been running for about fourteen months. The author publishes every Thursday, consistently, and has only missed two weeks in the entire run, both times with advance warning and a detailed explanation of why.
The reason to read this one now, rather than waiting for the conclusion: the last six chapters have been the best six chapters. The writer has found the gear where all the slow setup from the first year starts paying off. The comments section, which is often a mess in serialized fiction, has become unusually thoughtful in the past month, as longtime readers try to work out where the final arc is going. Reading it in real time, with the community, is a better experience than reading it in one sitting after the fact. I know this because I've talked to readers who waited, and they all say the same thing: they wish they'd read it live.
The one that's one-third done
This is the serial I'd most recommend to a new reader. It's early enough that you can catch up in a weekend. It's far enough along that the characters are established and the structure is clear. The author is, by their own account, about a third of the way through the planned arc. The pacing is measured. The craft is unusually tight for serialized work, this is a writer who clearly has a plan and is executing against it.
What makes it distinctive: the narrator's voice. Most dark romance in this form uses either a close third or a first-person present-tense. This writer uses first-person past, which is a choice that sounds small but which changes the emotional texture considerably. The narrator is not experiencing events alongside the reader. She is remembering them, which means we get her retrospective interpretation, her regret, her occasional flashes of what-if-I-had-known. This is a more literary frame than the genre typically uses. It works.
The narrator is not experiencing events alongside the reader. She is remembering them, which means we get her retrospective interpretation, her regret.
The one just starting
This one is brand new. Five chapters published. Nobody knows yet whether it's going to work, including, I suspect, the author.
I'm recommending it anyway because the first five chapters are extraordinary. The premise is straightforward for the genre, a woman arrives at a family wedding and meets someone she probably shouldn't, but the prose is careful in ways that serialized fiction rarely bothers with. The descriptions are specific. The dialogue has the strange pauses and non-sequiturs that real conversations have. The supporting cast is drawn with enough economy that you already, by chapter four, feel you know who these people are.
Could it fall apart? Of course. Most new serials do. I am making an early call, on the evidence of five chapters, that this one won't. I'm prepared to be wrong. If I am, I'll come back and say so.
For readers who want to track serialized updates more systematically than I do, Substack's built-in reader handles most of the newer projects; Royal Road has its own in-app notification system for ongoing serials; Wattpad does follows and alerts on individual writers. I still do it by bookmarking and checking, which is embarrassingly low-tech but keeps the dopamine hits manageable. If you're looking for a curated entry point, my thoughts on the format are in Serialized Dark Fiction Is Having a Moment.
Why I'm being coy about titles
Because the communities around these serials are small, and they're doing well, and the last thing any of them need is a flood of casual readers arriving from a blog post and flooding the comment sections with takes that miss what the regulars have spent months building.
This is a small reader's community posture that I know is going to seem precious. I don't mean it that way. I mean that the pleasure of serialized fiction is, in large part, the pleasure of reading something alongside a small group of other invested readers, and that small group is more delicate than it looks. When I point people toward specific titles, I try to do it in the context of explaining what to expect of the community, how to be a good comment-section citizen, and what to avoid.
If you're a regular reader of this journal and you want titles, write me. I'll send you a short list. I just don't want to put them in a public blog post that's going to get picked up by a search engine and send a crowd somewhere they haven't earned yet.
What I'll be doing at 11pm tonight
Refreshing my browser, on and off, until the new chapter of the first serial drops. Probably with tea. Probably in bed, because my kitchen is cold. Probably forgetting to go to sleep for another two hours after I finish it.
This is what the form does. This is why I'm writing about it, again, when I'd told myself I was going to write about something else this week. The chapter drops on Thursday. Tomorrow I'll read it. Friday I'll have thoughts about it. Next week it's going to happen again. This is the rhythm my reading life has, unexpectedly, settled into in the past year, and I don't think I want it any other way.