This review is based on an eARC (Advance Reading Copy) provided by the author in exchange for an honest review. Uncertain Sons and Other Stories will be released on September 16, 2025.
I’ve been reading Thomas Ha’s work for about four years now, and even though his most natural genre (weird horror) is one I typically don’t care for at all, he’s become one of my very favorite voices in short fiction. I’d already read nine of the twelve stories collected in Uncertain Sons and Other Stories, but when I had an opportunity to read all twelve as a collection, I wasn’t going to miss it.
Ordinarily, I view short story collections as a bag of stories. Yes, I read them in the intended order, but if I were to shake them up and read them in another order, I’m not convinced a lot would change. But it quickly became clear that Uncertain Sons and Other Stories was curated in such a way as to create something beyond a mere set of stories. It’s obvious right from the jump, with the juxtaposition of Window Boy and Cretins. These were two of my very favorite stories of 2023, and they’re probably my two favorite in this collection. But because one was published in a magazine I follow regularly and the other wasn’t, I read them a year apart and didn’t notice how well they mirror each other thematically. One takes place in a stratified, dystopian society, where the rich view the world from bunkers through screens, while the have-nots are left struggling for survival in a hostile outside world with environmental hazards and literal monsters. The other takes place in a more familiar setting, but one where a mysterious disease has saddled a non-negligible minority of the population with an extreme narcolepsy. Both stories are exceptional for the way they slowly build the atmosphere before leaving the reader with a true gut-punch of an ending. But placing them side-by-side highlights the ways in which they both deal with the tendency to look past the dangers right outside one’s window. In “Window Boy,” that’s a literal window, with the lead gazing upon a hostile landscape while secure in the knowledge that he doesn’t have to do anything about it. “Cretins” is told the other way around, from the perspective of a chronically ill character who builds entire routines around keeping himself from being assaulted in public while bystanders go about their day. Both stories are powerfully tense, and the themes reinforce each other to create an even more eye-catching experience when reading them back-to-back.
The curation of the collection also highlights little worldbuilding flourishes that create subtle connections between various tales. Ten of the twelve take place in a world that feels very much like a version of ours—the exceptions being the space setting of Sweetbaby and the ambiguous, possibly secondary world of The Mub—but House Traveler presents a series of parallel universes that connect directly to the not-quite-like-ours worlds of The Sort and Uncertain Sons. All three are readable on their own, and “The Sort” in particular was one of my favorite stories of 2024 for the way it presents the everyday struggles of parenting neurodivergent children in a world that’s just a little bit uncanny and perhaps more than a little bit hostile. But “Uncertain Sons” calls back details from the other two in such a way as to make it feel like a true culmination of what came before. For fans of weird action-horror—which I am not—I’m sure it may be an exceptional read all on its own. Ha certainly develops a harrowing atmosphere of danger and uncertainty. But the ways in which it builds on the prior stories raises its level in context, giving it a power as the collection’s capstone beyond what it would have as a standalone.
In discussing how the stories come together to make a collection, I’ve indirectly talked quite a bit about the stories themselves. But let me do so more directly. For those who have not read Thomas Ha before, you’ll quickly see a consistent style develop. He tends to locate his stories in the ambiguous spaces between sci-fi, fantasy, and horror, with a groundedness that suggest his settings could be any ordinary suburb, his protagonists ordinary fathers or sons (or occasionally daughters), but with a writing style that creates just a hint of the uncanny, building tension as the reader tries to piece together precisely just what is strange about the tale. The oldest Ha story I’ve read, Where the Old Neighbors Go, has a style I would’ve once described as stilted, but oddly compelling. But as it’s presented here in the context of his other work, it’s easy to see it as an example of a developing style that keeps the reader just a half-beat distant from their expectations. “Where the Old Neighbors Go” is itself a solid story about dealing with magical creatures with lots of power but also pretty distinct rules they must follow, but it’s a good example of how that uncanny wrongness develops even in more straightforward stories. It only intensifies in Ha’s more recent work.
His more recent work also has a bit less tendency to have clear-cut plot resolutions. He largely bucks this trend in the title story “Uncertain Sons,” but by and large, the sort of ending you’ll see here is not an enemy being defeated but instead a decision being made or an outlook changing. Sometimes those decisions are encouraging, sometimes they’re disheartening, and sometimes it’s hard to tell exactly what to think about them. But even when they’re ambiguous, they always seem to be saying something about the themes under examination.
I’ve already mentioned that one of the most common themes is that of how people respond to danger or harm that may not directly affect them. This comes out powerfully clear in “Window Boy” and “Cretins,” but it’s a major piece of Balloon Season and at least a minor theme in several other tales. Another theme running strongly through the entire connection is that of relationships between parents and children. There are no straightforwardly evil parents here—even the ones performing horrifying actions (like those in “Sweetbaby”) have a clear sense in which they’re trying their best. But neither are there any straightforward parenting decisions. Perhaps the most unambiguously good parents are the main character of “The Sort” and the deceased father of “Uncertain Sons,” but both live in worlds full of dangers, where they’re forced to make difficult decisions without any clear knowledge of whether the ultimate results will be good or bad. On the other hand, The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video tells a wonderfully heartfelt tale of preserving the memory of a departed mother as she really was, not simplifying her life into that of saint or villain. Alabama Circus Punk and “House Traveler” take the ambiguity in a different direction, with the leads feeling a sort of parental affection or responsibility in the absence of a recognizably parental preexisting relationship.
At the risk of spending far too much time talking about The Themes, I also want to highlight a thread of loss and preservation that runs through so much of the collection. That can be as simple as “people want to take things from me” (as in “Where the Old Neighbors Go”) or “circumstances have robbed us of our old life” (as in “Cretins” and “Balloon Season”), or even a loss of childlike innocence (in The Fairgrounds). But there’s an undercurrent of disorientation threading through much of the work that dovetails wonderfully with that slightly uncanny narrative style to really help the reader feel the loss. The nature of the lead’s condition in “Cretins” inevitably makes for perceptual gaps that create a real sense of foreboding—gaps which the lead spends much of the tale trying to recover via other means. It’s even stranger in “The Mub,” “Alabama Circus Punk,” and to some extent “House Traveler,” where the leads often cannot rely on their own minds to supply a reliable accounting of the past in order to determine what’s missing in the present. And I admit that sometimes the disorientation is so great that I’m not quite sure what to take away at the end of those stories—it’s perhaps no coincidence that none of those three would rate among my top four in the collection, even as I felt the confusion delivered true narrative weight in all three cases. Finally, this unreliability of recollection is made explicit and taken outside the mind in the absolutely tremendous “The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video,” which deals with holding onto imperfect memory in a society hellbent on touching up and improving everything they can, from books to recordings to real-time perception.
In case you can’t tell from all the time I spent going on about the themes or the quality of the curation, I think this is a fantastic collection. The stories range from good to tremendous, and they’re only improved by reading together. For my money, the best of the best are Cretins, Window Boy, and The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video. But I also was really impressed by The Sort, The Mub, and Uncertain Sons. That’s already half the collection and we haven’t even gotten to stories that may be a pinch too weird for me but that I find myself appreciating more and more on reread, like Alabama Circus Punk.
If you like weird horror at all, don’t wait, preorder this collection immediately (or ask your library to do it for you, I don’t judge). If you’re not usually a horror fan (as I am not) but appreciate theme-heavy sci-fi with person-level stakes, find something Ha has written that’s available online and see how the narrative voice works for you. I’d probably recommend “Cretins” or “Window Boy” as an approachable introduction to his style, but if you’re looking for more vibes and less plot, “The Sort” would also make a good test case. It’s probably not a style that will hit for everyone, but if it works for you, you may have just found a new favorite author.
Recommended if you like: weird horror, meditative sci-fi with personal stakes, subtle hints of the uncanny.
Can I use it for Bingo? It’s hard mode for Five Short Stories and Small Press. It’s also Published in 2025 by a POC Author, and I’m going to go out on a limb and call it a fit for Hidden Gem.
Overall rating: 19 of Tar Vol’s 20. Five stars on Goodreads.