Ponies: A Short Horror Story

Kij Johnson

Feb 2020 · Come Join Us By the Fire Book 19 · Nightfire · Narrated by Saskia Maarleveld

97 reviews

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9 min

Unabridged

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About this audiobook

Winner of the Nebula Award for Short Story

"Ponies" is a short horror story by Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Kij Johnson, one of 35 entries in the audio anthology Come Join Us by the Fire.

If you want to be friends with The Other Girls, you're going to have to give something up; this is the way it's always been, as long as there have been Ponies.

Come Join Us by the Fire, edited by Theresa DeLucci, is an audio-only horror anthology of 35 short stories from Nightfire Books, a horror imprint of Tor Books. The collection showcases the breadth of talent writing in the horror genre today, with contributions from a wide range of bestselling genre luminaries including China Miéville, Chuck Wendig, Richard Kadrey, and Victor LaValle; Shirley Jackson Award winners Paul Tremblay, Priya Sharma, and Sam J. Miller; Nebula Award winners Brooke Bolander, Alyssa Wong, Kij Johnson; and many, many more.

Winner of the Nebula Award for Short Story "Ponies" is a short horror story by Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Kij Johnson, one of 35 entries in the audio anthology Come Join Us by the Fire. If you want to be friends with The Other Girls, you're going to have to give something up; this is...

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Ratings and reviews

97 reviews

C “Peapod”

February 10, 2023

To be fair it's a pretty good HORROR story...BUT I don't think there is one of us readers who didn't want the alt ending to be seeing the group of mini Karen's get horse stomped into a blood/bone, glittered covered paste... Great short horror story..

A Google user

March 23, 2020

Shallow and a waste of time. All it has are vanity, terrible social values and lack of character with no story depth or plot of any kind.

21 people found this review helpful

Tara Jackson

February 24, 2026

there is something so sinister about this story I come back to her over and over and over and every time I get so mad at those girls... you don't even have a pony.. how dare they... mean girls will always suck I'm 48 years old and this story rocks! you don't even have a pony oh those girls those poor ponies♥️ after reading the rest of the reviews of this story I am actually kind of dumbfounded I think it's a fabulous story... like I said I keep coming back to it over and over again.. I'm not a writer I just like to read..

About the author

Kij Johnson is novelist and short-story writer, a winner of the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award (three times), the World Fantasy Award (twice), the Sturgeon Award, and the Crawford Award. She has worked in book publishing, comics, game publishing, and the tech industry, before settling into teaching creative writing and science fiction/fantasy at the University of Kansas.

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