The After

By: Tayler Vaughn

Many thanks to Inside Story for the ARC of this short story!

Maxwell, Caroline, Lily, and Olive meet at a grief group. And while each has their own trauma, they find a way of bonding together, and creating a cult. When they murder two adults and kidnap the children to be part of the cult, the police get involved.

This is a short story at 77 pages. The chapters are short, and we get chapters from the 4 different character, and three timelines throughout, the Before, the During, and the After. They three different timelines and the characters all jumped around. That didn’t work for me. With the denseness of the subject matter, I found it a little hard to reset my thinking at the beginning of each new chapter.

I didn’t connect with any of the characters, and I don’t necessarily have to, but it is nice when it happens. Especially when there is so much jumping around and resetting of my mind as to where we are in the story, being able to root for someone would have helped.

There is a twist at the end that I didn’t see coming, which was a nice surprise! I just think that if this was told a tad more linearly, I would have enjoyed it more.

Publish Date: September 6, 2026
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