A Triumph of Dark Speculation: Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine by Kristina Ten

In Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine, Kristina Ten masterfully contorts the familiar artefacts of youth, CD-ROM language games, cootie catchers, summer camp legends, and playground clones, into a series of unsettling and brilliant speculative tales. This debut collection establishes that the twelve stories within are an exploration of memory, alienation, and the quiet horrors of assimilation.

A central, unifying genius of the collection is its focus on the games and folklore of childhood, which Ten warps into vehicles of both personal liberation and cosmic dread. The collection opens with the award-nominated “The Dizzy Room,” where a young protagonist, a child of immigrant parents and an ESL learner, uses a language-learning CD-ROM to catch up with her classmates.

However, the “Dizzy Game” begins teaching her an otherworldly language, introducing a brilliant hint of cosmic horror into the already fraught experience of language acquisition and cultural assimilation. This story pairs powerfully with “The Curing,” which follows a group of middle-school outcasts who discover how to make copies of themselves by applying and peeling dried glue from their skin. These “spirit people” soon become smoother, better-liked doppelgängers, a haunting metaphor for the erasure of self often demanded to fit in.

“Approved Methods of Love Divination in the First-Rate City of Dushagorod” constructs a compelling narrative around fortune-telling games, such as cootie catchers, set against the backdrop of a society desperate to repopulate after a devastating war. Similarly, “Bunny Ears” captures the unique terror and allure of sleepaway camp legends, as a young girl named Hannah hears the story of feral “bunny-ear kids” and finds herself drawn to their myth as an escape from her own feelings of abandonment and social anxiety. In Ten’s world, the games children play are never just games; they are rituals for survival, mapping the complex rules of a world that often feels hostile.

The most potent theme running through the collection is what Ten herself describes as “the horrors of inhabiting a body others seek to control”. This is not a vague, abstract horror but a concrete, political one, dealing squarely with immigrant and first-generation experiences, gender-based violence, and reproductive justice. The body becomes a site of rebellion, transformation, and profound violation.

Nowhere is this more evident than in “Last Letter First,” a stunning piece in which two women bond on an intergalactic bus ride. Both are travelling to undergo body modifications illegal on Earth, one an abortion, the other a hysterectomy. The story masterfully utilises the liminal space of the bus to explore their temporary friendship and the transformative control they seek over their own bodies, culminating in an unexpected yet powerful act of solidarity. This theme of bodily autonomy is literalized in a different way in “The Advocate,” where a woman’s battle against dismissive doctors is rendered as a literal joust, with information as her armour.

The collection’s body horror is often brutal and unflinching. “Mel for Melissa” is a confessional narrative from a former volleyball player, Kat, who recounts the trauma inflicted by a coach who obsessively tracked the players’ weight, leading to self-destructive behaviours and a gruesome, unforgettable act by her friend Mel.

In “The Flood, the Tumble, the Talons, the Trick,” a more fantastical allegory unfolds as a man takes a dragon captive in his basement, forcing cards under her scales to cheat at poker, a stark exploration of beauty as utility and the commodification of the female form. Through these stories, Ten argues that for those whose bodies are policed by society, family, or the state, the experience of embodiment is itself a kind of speculative nightmare.

Ten’s talent is not confined to plot and theme; it extends to a bold and playful experimentation with form, demonstrating how structure can deepen a story’s emotional and political impact. The most striking example is “ADJECTIVE,” a story written in the format of a Mad Libs game. This “hermit-crab” narrative, a form Ten admits a fondness for, uses the playful template to tell a story about an immigrant dealing with workplace microaggressions. The format brilliantly highlights the depressing commonality of such experiences.

Her own background as a Russian-Korean American who moved to the U.S. as a child directly informs the collection’s themes. She has spoken about the weight of being geographically and culturally apart from her family and the pressure she felt to assimilate and “be doubly American” in grade school. Writing stories infused with Russian folklore became a way to reconnect with her heritage, while dropping these myths into modern American settings helped her make sense of her own bifurcated identity .

Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine is a rare and remarkable debut. It is a collection that is both conceptually sharp and deeply felt, a book that understands the dark undercurrents of nostalgia and the high stakes of the games we are forced to play. Kristina Ten arranges her stories with a curator’s care, allowing them to speak to one another and build a cohesive, devastating whole. The threads of liminality, transformation, and resistance bind these tales into a powerful statement on community as the ultimate antidote to isolation and control.

For readers who cherish the dark, weird, and playful work of writers like Kelly Link, Carmen Maria Machado, and Karen Russell, this collection is a must-have new addition. It is a book that will challenge you to reconsider the rituals of your own past and the political realities of the present. 

Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine by Kristina Ten    

A strange and sinister debut from Stephen Dixon Award-winning author Kristina Ten    

The new kid in school discovers a diabolical presence in the depths of an English-language-learning CD-ROM. A desperate and declining empire designs an elaborate matchmaking system around cootie catchers and soda-can tabs. A former varsity volleyball player reopens the grisly wounds of her youth, haunted by a lost friend. In each story, the game has been twisted. In each game, players must make their own rules. Through a bloody, shattered lens, the artifacts of growing up take on a new and disquieting power—riddles remain unsolved, pranks have perilous stakes, and superstitions won’t save you.  

Populated by living paper dolls, summer camp legends, and trivia nights gone terribly wrong, the twelve genre-crossing tales in Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine wrestle with themes of memory, disobedience, alienation, belonging, and the horrors of inhabiting a body others seek to control. 

PRAISE FOR TELL ME YOURS, I’LL TELL YOU MINE

“Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine is a joyous, incisive, inventive, and vital run of stories. I’d put it right alongside Terry Bisson’s Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories, but with the distinct possibility that you might see some of Kelly Link’s stone bunnies on the next page turn. You’ll read this with a nervous grin, and then you’ll read it again, just to see how Kristina Ten pulls some of these magic tricks off.”  
– Stephen Graham Jones, author of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter and My Heart Is a Chainsaw 

“Never have I ever tasted such a delicious cocktail of nostalgia and dread. Reading these stories feels like saying Bloody Mary into the mirror: in Kristina Ten’s expertly crafted world, your own reflection becomes a monster. Fans of Kelly Link and Karen Russell will adore every darn second of this book. I know I did.”  
– GennaRose Nethercott, author of Thistlefoot and Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart 

“Kristina Ten’s Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine is an audacious debut, displaying a comfortable command across a variety of genres. These stories mix the creepy with the touching, the grotesque with the beautiful. My heart ached for some of these characters, pounded in fury for others. Ten is a writer to reckon with.” 
– Nathan Ballingrud, author of The Strange and Crypt of the Moon Spider 

“Imagine you’re playing a game, one of the oldest and best-loved in your collection, a game you’ve always found completely pleasurable, completely absorbing. This time, though, midway through the first round, the rules seem to bend and turn inside out. You no longer recognize the board, you realize, and what’s with these playing pieces? Where did they come from? Did you move that one just now and forget about it, or did it move itself? The game is still pleasurable, still absorbing, but unfamiliar suddenly, and slightly threatening. That’s what reading Kristina Ten is like. Her stories are marvels, and page after page they found new ways to surprise and discomfit me.” 
– Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Ghost Variations  

“The stories of Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine delight in trickery. Its collective narrative⁣ voice is somehow one of comfort, of solace; it might even evoke feelings of nostalgia—if you⁣ were raised in The Twilight Zone.”⁣  
– Joe Vallese, editor of It Came from the Closet 

“In Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine, Kristina Ten transports us back to the schoolyard . . . just not the way we remember it. Infused with horror and heartbreak, these stories play at the edges of realism, dip in and out of the fantastic, and showcase Ten’s incredible range as her characters navigate girlhood and womanhood, the immigrant experience, and the indelible marks that our histories leave on our futures. This collection delights from start to finish, each story a fresh take on our oldest fears.” 
– Gwen E. Kirby, author of Shit Cassandra Saw 

Bio:

Kristina Ten is the author of Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine (2025, Stillhouse Press). Her stories appear in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction, The Best Weird Fiction of the Year, Nightmare, The Dark, and elsewhere. She has won the McSweeney’s Stephen Dixon Award for Short Fiction, the Subjective Chaos Kind of Award, and the F(r)iction Writing Contest, and has been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and the Locus Award. A graduate of Clarion West Writers Workshop and the University of Colorado Boulder’s MFA program in fiction, Ten has received fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation and the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. Find her at kristinaten.com. 

Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine is available for purchase from Stillhouse Press and anywhere books are sold.

Contact:

Website: kristinaten.com

Instagram: @kristinasergeevnaten

Threads: @kristinasergeevnaten

Bluesky: @kristinaten.bsky.social 

X: @kristina_ten 

Facebook: @kristina.ten

Goodreads page: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8086492.Kristina_Ten

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