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Book Review: The Wishing Pool and Other Stories by Tananarive Due

The Wishing Pool and Other Stories by Tananarive Due

Akashic Books, 2024

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1636141794

Available: Paperback, hardcover, Kindle edition, audiobook

Buy:  Bookshop.org |  Amazon.com

 

The Wishing Pool is a brilliant collection of of horror and Afrofuturistic short stories centering Black characters, Tananarive Due’s first short story collection since Ghost Summer. While it’s mostly reprints, there are a few stories that only appear here, and the majority of readers will find plenty of work new to them.

 

The collection is divided into four sections: “Wishes”, “The Gracetown Stories”, “The Nayima Stories”, and “Future Shock”.

 

“Wishes” includes “The Wishing Pool”, a heartbreaking story in which Joy, desperate to restore her father from his dementia, makes a wish on the wishing pool, despite knowing it might have unpleasant consequences,  “Incident at Bear Creek Lodge”, which won the World Fantasy Award, and “Dancing”, in which  Monique, her recently deceased grandmother’s caretaker, is forced to dance to death after internalizing her thwarted dream to become a ballerina, among its six tales.

 

“The Gracetown Stories” includes five stories, all involving individuals from the fictional Gracetown, Florida, where racism, Florida weirdness, and the supernatural combine. Gracetown first appears in Ghost Summer, and the Gracetown School for Boys is the setting for Due’s Stoker-winning novel The Reformatory. Due does a great job creating an atmospheric Florida setting, laced with terror. in “Last Stop on Route 9”, Charlotte and her 12 year old cousin Kai drive out of a mysterious fog and pull over to a gas station to ask for directions… which could be the last thing they ever do. “Rumpus Room” follows a single mother who has lost custody of her daughter after she takes a job working as  housekeeper, living in an unattached “rumpus room” that used to belong to her employer’s deceased daughter. There’s something disturbingly wrong about the room, though… Due does a great job creating an environment of uncertainty, dread, and panic.

 

“The Nayima Stories”  are a pair of stories that follow Nayima, immune but a carrier of a plague that has caused mass deaths. “One Day Only” takes place during the plague, with survivors staking their places in an abandoned Malibu until they’re forcibly moved, taking a moment to come together. “Attachment Disorder” takes place after a vaccine has been discovered…. but that hasn’t made things easier for carriers. Due’s world-building is fantastic- you really feel like you are inhabiting Nayima’s world.  “Future Shock” contains three additional plague and post-plague stories, unrelated to Nayima’s world, taking place in the future. “The Biographer” is a disorienting story about Olivia, an elderly screenwriter whose prescient movie about a global plague made her famous, who has been assigned a very strange Biographer to tell her life story.

 

Short story collections usually have misses as well as hits. The Wishing Pool is the rare collection where every story is outstanding, Highly recommended.

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

Book Review: Hell Followed with Us by Andrew Joseph White

Cover art for Hell Followed with Us by Andrew Joseph White

Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White.

Peachtree Teen, 2022

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1682633243

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition Bookshop.orgAmazon.com )

 

Hell Followed with Us is an incredible and original book, but it is not an easy read. It is a scream of rage. Make sure to read the author’s content warnings at the beginning of the book.

 

Benji is a trans boy injected with a virus that will turn him into a genocidal monster, a Seraph, for a doomsday cult, the Angels. He tries running away but is captured by the cult’s death squad. A group called the Watch, queer teens inhabiting their destroyed teen center for LGBTQ+ youth, attacks and kills everyone in the death squad except Benji, who is offered refuge by the leader, Nick, an autistic gay boy. Nick knows Benji is the Seraph, but hides it to protect him, believing that his powers will allow him to control the Graces, monstrous creatures made from infected bodies trained by the Angels to attack nonbelievers.

 

The Watch successfully attacks a church with Benji’s help. Benji discovers his fiance, Theo, is hiding in the church, and visits him there, only to find that the visit was used by the Angels as an opportunity to burn down the home of the Watch. As Benji continues to physically disintegrate into the Seraph, he makes a plan with Nick to pretend to return and cooperate with the Angels, despite their murder of his father, transphobia, and religious extremism. While the first plan is botched and Benji turns fully into a Seraph, a second plan unleashes a bloodbath on the Angels and frees the Watch from fear and persecution..

 

Andrew Joseph White wrote this for trans kids facing a hostile world, to give them a mirror of a trans boy who fights back. But it’s not necessary to be trans or queer to be wowed by it.  So many of the major characters were queer that I got to see many different aspects of how they characters experienced their queerness, and it also didn’t become the only factor defining their identities. I loved the found family feeling of the members of the Watch, looking out for each other in a hostile world.

 

It’s difficult to imagine how hard-right evangelical Christianity in this country could get more repressive and violent than it currently is, but somehow White takes it to an even more terrifying extreme. Highly recommended.

 

 

Contains: transphobia, deadnaming, misgendering, graphic violence, domestic, child, and religious abuse, body horror

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

 

Book List: Pandemic Fiction Recommendations

There are a lot of books out there to choose from if you want to jack up your anxiety levels right now by reading about pandemics, but there are a few that are far-out enough that you can probably read them without comparing them to our current situation. Whether they’re set in the future, supernatural in nature, or just outside the realm of probability, these books offer us pandemics that can’t touch us.

The Fireman by Joe Hill. The pandemic is caused by a spore that spreads a condition called “dragonscale” that eventually causes the infected to overheat and spontaneously combust. Harper, the main character, who is infected, pregnant, and a nurse, is a complex and fascinating character coping in the midst of panic, disease, isolation, and fear.

Doomsday Book by Connie Willis.  First off, I am biased towards anything by Connie Wills, but this really is a compelling book, impossible for me to put down once I start it. Willis has written a series of time travel novels and short stories that take place at Oxford University, mostly in the history department, headed by Mr. Dunworthy.  Kivrin, one of his students, has been preparing to visit England near the time of the Black Plague, but due to an error in timing, ends up in the midst of it, a stranger in a community that is disintegrating and literally dying. In the future,  plague is spreading speedily through Oxford, which has been locked down in quarantine procedures, and when it is discovered that the tech running the time machine is patient zero, Dunworthy’s superior shuts down the department entirely, leaving Kivrin lost in the past and pandemics raging in both places. Despite the terrifying circumstances, Willis manages to find humor in the humanity and oddities of many of the characters in a story that is dead serious.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. This book has gotten plenty of attention, including compliments from George R. R. Martin. It is post-apocalyptic, varying between a storyline about a group of musicians and actors traveling between the small communities left after a pandemic killed off most of the people, and vignettes about the past, and the people who died from the disease, described in a memorable fashion.

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks:  If ever you wanted an alternate history of how an outbreak can spread and lead to massive changes in the world, you’ve got it here.  Brooks uses a different narrative approach than readers may be used to, with his work consisting of short narratives, or “interviews” with different people who lived through the outbreak and the zombie war.

Y: The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra: In this series of graphic novels, disease has killed off all the men except one, Yorick Brown, and his pet Capuchin monkey Ampersand. I don’t consider this horror, but it is a brilliant concept, and pulled off beautifully.