Flash Club Live: Beth Anderson’s “Bar Succubus”

Flash Club gathered around Beth Anderson’s “Bar Succubus,” a sly, unsettling flash that gave us plenty to admire. We talked about the force of second person, the risks and rewards of monologue, and how a voice can move from seductive to predatory without ever losing control. We looked at the story’s hinge, the way our understanding shifts across the piece, and how the final turn widens from one couple’s secret encounter to something much larger: appetite, dissatisfaction, longing, and the human habit of wanting more.

We also spent time with one of the story’s sharpest craft moves: turning setting into character. In “Bar Succubus,” the bar is not backdrop but consciousness, body, witness, and hunger all at once. The room itself sees, knows, tempts, remembers, and feeds.

Begin by making a list of places people willingly enter: a fitting room, grocery store, motel room, church basement, greenhouse, dentist’s office, used boat cabin, late-night diner. Then choose one.

Give that place awareness. What has it seen over the years? What patterns does it recognize? What private things does it know about the people who pass through?

Write in the voice of the place. You might use first person or second person. Let the setting speak directly to the visitor, observe them, judge them, comfort them, lure them, or misunderstand them.

As the piece develops, let the place want something. It may want to help, to keep, to protect, to expose, to consume, to confess. Allow the setting to move from passive container to active force.

The goal is to let place become pressure, presence, and participant.

Then we asked Beth a few questions about her work…

You made the bar itself the succubus and it’s both a physical space and predatory being. What drew you to this specific metaphor of architecture and atmosphere as a creature of temptation?

TELL US ABOUT THE PAINTING? Can you tell us why you chose it? And cast it in that role?

I’m going to combine these two questions into one answer. Architecture and atmosphere as creature of temptation is the root of this story, whose setting was inspired by a real bar in Houston, TX, the city where I lived in the late 90s/early 00s. Almost every element of the setting is drawn from my recollection of the bar’s interior – including the painting, whose appearance and placement are exactly as described in the story. And, yes, locals called the bar “the cheating spouse.”

The sensibility of the bar resonated with me. I’ve never encountered another place like it. I always wanted to bring it into a story and carried it in my memory for over a decade, waiting for the right time. One afternoon, in the midst of my final MFA semester, I went outside for a break from writing my thesis, and while walking alongside the creek near my house, listening to Neko Case, I thought: what if the bar is a succubus? I came home and wrote a complete draft of the story in one sitting.

Bar-as-succubus turned out to be the right frame to share my impressions and recollections of this extraordinary place, which is, in a sense, a shrine to lust and temptation.

The narrator repeatedly emphasizes that “those like you taste best” because of their hope. What fascinates you about hope as the most delicious emotional vulnerability in a story about lust and infidelity?

I once heard renowned horror editor Ellen Datlow say that a horror tale is a story “without hope.” While I didn’t consciously incorporate her statement into the writing of this story, it makes sense to me that this creature of darkness would be most thrilled and satisfied by consuming its opposite – hope.

The story uses a direct, caressing second-person address that feels both intimate and predatory. How did you approach writing from the succubus’s perspective in this way?

I like playing around with point-of-view, especially in flash. (The last story published before this one was told from the POV of twin sisters using a dual “we” first person.) My first MFA mentor, a playwright, assigned me to write monologues for my characters as a way of getting to know them better. I enjoyed the process and appropriated the form here for my succubus narrator.

Just as the word “you” can indicate singular or group, the succubus’ use of “you” in regard to the couple indicates these victims are simultaneously unique individuals and of a type the succubus sees again and again. The succubus cherishes each one; however, it’s the abundance of the never-ending supply that truly brings satisfaction.

The story ends by noting that only those “satisfied with how things are” escape the bar. What do you think this piece says about modern desire, fidelity, and the human need for something “more”?

The best stories are true, and I think this one is.

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