Michael Hagen writes fiction shaped by hunger, memory, labor, and place. His stories move between rural landscapes, small towns, and stranger territories where memory and loss distort the ordinary. Blending literary realism, horror, and speculative elements, his work explores inheritance, grief, and the quiet forces that pass from one life to another.
The Fourth Room
Literary horror
A woman wakes inside a sealed concrete chamber connected to three identical rooms. As the dim red light fades and the figures inside begin to move, the space becomes a study in confinement, perception, and the terror of being seen.
Short fiction – available for publication
Before the Pines
Literary horror
Bodies rise along a shoreline and move toward a town where ritual seems older than memory. As the crowd passes open houses, abandoned streets, and a ruined church, the landscape reveals a cycle of burial and return.
Short fiction – available for publication
The Pig-Shaped Jar
Literary fiction
A man returns to a lake cabin carrying his stepfather’s ashes in a porcelain pig-shaped jar. Over the course of a quiet evening and morning, memory, grief, and the physical remains of a shared life gather into a reckoning with what the lake holds.
Short fiction – available for publication
Along the Fence Line
Literary fiction
Set across a day of hunting and fence work, this story traces marriage, illness, and devotion through the details of land, weather, and labor. A quiet story about endurance and the ways love persists inside the practical tasks of a shared life.
Short fiction – available for publication
The Broadcast
Speculative fiction
A lone astronaut continues transmitting fragments of memory while orbiting a silent world. As oxygen and power run down, the broadcast becomes less a signal than an act of remembering.
Flash fiction – available for publication