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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

Posted on September 20, 2024 by , Reply

Book Review: Prince of the Wasteland (The Book of Thrice Dead #1) by Joseph Sale

Cover art for Prince of the Wasteland by Joaseph Sale

Prince of the Wasteland (The Book of Thrice Dead #1) by Joseph Sale

The Writing Collective, 2022 (originally published 2014)

ISBN: 9798841855231

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

Buy:  Amazon.com | Bookshop.org

 

 

With post-apocalyptic novels, there’s King’s The Stand, McCammon’s Swan Song…and then there’s everything else.  However, Joseph Sale’s Prince of the Wasteland ranks pretty high among the books of the “everything else” pile.  Mixing the bleakness of a post-nuclear world with a touch of magic and dark fantasy towards the end, it’s certainly worth the read.

 

Prince is set entirely in the ruins of New York City,  which is run by a small group of humans known as the Apostles, who have supernatural powers they received from somewhere (the answer to that comes later in the book).  Despite their powers, they are still all too human, as infighting and the problems of the old world still persist (apparently, nuclear war did not solve the problem of drug addiction).  However, they are united in their purpose to maintain their status as rulers, so they destroy anyone else in the city who shows any hint of having the same otherworldly abilities they possess.  The Apostles are certainly the most interesting part of the book. They have cool names like Slick, Bleak Heart, Razor, and the Man in the Black Hat, and their names often pertain to their abilities.  Some of the abilities are what you would expect, but others are quite creative, with Slick’s ability to turn his perspiration into an oily lubricant being the most intriguing, as well as handy for getting in and out of tight places!

 

The overall plot centers on the Man refusing to kill Lucy, a child with supernatural powers, and what he has to do to hide his disloyalty from the ruler of New York City, the Prince.  He wants to help Lucy, not an easy thing to do, since the Prince has powers of his own that make subversion difficult.  Lucy does play a critical part in the book, but she feels more like a foil to the others.  The real stars of the story are the Apostles, with all the intrigue and excitement that comes with a group of selfish backstabbers trying to work together to stay in power.

 

There’s also the separate plot thread of the Fool King, who maintains his own sort of kingdom in the sewers, that ties into the main story as it goes along.  It’s a fairly eclectic mix, but it all hangs together to provide a good read that most dark fantasy fans should love.  The main takeaway is although this was one of his first novels, it’s clear that with Prince, Joseph Sale was already a talent to be taken seriously.  His writing isn’t as developed here as it is in the incredible Carcosa series, but it was already a good deal better than many authors.

 

My bottom line on this one is: definitely worth reading, especially for post-nuke fans.  This is the first in a series of six books, who knows where it will go from here?  Recommended.

 

 

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson

 

 

Posted on May 8, 2024 by , Reply

Book Review: Extasia by Claire Legrand

Extasia by Claire Legrand

Extasia by Claire Legrand

Katherine Tegen Books, 2022

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0062696632

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook

( Bookshop.org |  Amazon.com )

 

Extasia is a fiercely feminist dark novel of a post-apocalyptic community drenched in patriarchy and cult-like violent misogyny straight from The Crucible and Year of the Witching. The dogma is that women were responsible for the destruction of the world and thus four young girls are honored with the “sacred duty” of becoming saints, scapegoats who once a month face brutal mob violence from the community in order to expiate their sins. A serial killer has been murdering men, and the upcoming sainthood of Amity Barrow is expected to bless the community and end the killing. When the murders continue, Amity and her sister saints realize they must find a way to either solve the murders or escape. Just as things seem desperate, she is transported with her sister saints to a secret world, Avazel, and invited to join a coven and learn to wield the magical, dark power of extasia to end the killings and realize her own strength… but there’s more going on under the surface than she knows.

 

Extasia is visceral, violent, and disturbing in its intensity, but Amity is not completely isolated. She develops imperfect but strong relationships with girls and women from her community and the coven that survive even significant disagreements. While it’s somewhat heavy-handed, Legrand has outdone herself in creating a dark, powerful, horror story made even more terrible by the foundation of lies, grisly violence, and hate on which human survival after the apocalypse has been built..Recommended for ages 16+

 

Contains: violence to and killing of animals, attempted rape, torture, gore, murder, body horror, violence, gaslighting, religious trauma.

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

Posted on March 7, 2022 by , Reply
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