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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: A Darker Shade of Noir: New Stories of Body Horror by Women Writers edited by Joyce Carol Oates

Cover art for A Darker Shade of Noir edited by Joyce Carol Oates

 

A Darker Shade of Noir: New Stories of Body Horror by Women Writers

Edited by Joyce Carol Oates

Akashic  Books, 2023

ISBN: 978-1636141343

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition

Buy:  Bookshop.orgAmazon.com

 

 

A Darker Shade of Noir: New Stories of Body Horror by Women Writers  disturbs the imagination and makes horror reality. Writers Megan Abbott, Margaret Atwood, Aimee Bender, Tananarive Due, Elizabeth Hand, Cassandra Khaw, Sheila Kohler, Aimee LaBrie, Raven Leilani, Lisa Lim, Joanna Margaret, Valerie Martin, Joyce Carol Oates, Lisa Tuttle, and Yumi Dineen Shiroma offer many strange, twisted stories that attest to the diversity of approaches to the genre.

 

Editor Joyce Carol Oates divides these little masterpieces into three sections: “You’ve Created a Monster,” “Morbid Anatomy,” and “Out of Body, Out of Time.” Aimee Bender’s story “Frank Jones” opens the book with the weird creation of a skin tag doll that should not have been taken to the office. Margaret Atwood delves into female anatomy through a snail who suddenly becomes a woman customer service rep in “Metempsychosis, or The Journey of the Soul.” And then we find a new wife, in ““Sydney” by Sheila Kohler, who finds herself in a shocking sexual situation with a gender-bending robot when she ventures into a part of her home that is designated as off limits by her husband.

 

There are often very surprising developments in these stories. In “Concealed Carry” by Lisa Tuttle, Kelly, fresh from London, finds out that there is a strict moral code in Texas that is enforced in a way she could never imagine.  In “Malena” by Joanna Margaret, Laura, who makes sculptures of women with missing body parts, discovers that the artistic “gift inside her” is also literally inside her. In “Dancing with Mirrors” by Lisa Lim,   a beautiful woman addicted to mirrors hides spectacularly murderous veins..

 

In addition to being entertaining, these writers are not afraid to tackle serious issues. “Dancing” by Tananarive Due and “Breathing Exercise” by Raven Leilani grapple with the impact of racism on the mind, body and soul.. Aimee Labrie in “Gross Anatomy”, and Cassandra Khaw in “Muzzle”, deal with physical violence against women. These are stories that head straight to the heart of the matter without becoming entangled in politics and platitudes.

 

Readers truly benefit from iconic writer Joyce Carol Oates’s expert shaping of this excellent collection of stories. There is not one dull moment in this book, and beginning the next story is like the start of a new and darker adventure.

 

Reviewed by Nova Hadley

 

 

 

Graphic Novel Review: Lovesickness: Junji Ito Story Collection by Junji Ito

Cover art for Lovesickness: Junji Ito Story Collection by Junji Ito

 

Lovesickness: Junji Ito Story Collection by Junji Ito

Viz Media, 2021

ISBN: 9781974719846

Available:  Hardcover, Kindle edition

Buy: Bookshop.orgAmazon.com

 

In Lovesickness, originally published in 1996 and told in 5 parts, Ryusuke Fukuda and his parents move back to the town of Nazumi after his father accepts a job there. The story opens with a teenage girl approaching the crossroads of an empty street where a man is emerging from the fog. She quickly places her notebook over her face and asks for a fortune. The older man responds and they part ways. When the man meets his family at the Nazumi train station, it is revealed that he is Ryusuke’s father. He relates the story to his wife and son, the latter shaken by the chance meeting.

 

When he starts at school the next day, he is greeted by an old friend, Midori. Eventually the topic of rumors comes up regarding teenage girls committing suicide after encountering a mysterious handsome young man. Ryusuke, in an attempt to calm his own guilty conscience when he reveals a terrible fortune he gave to a woman in distress, which led to a grisly suicide, hunts for the shadowy figure delivering his own tragic fortunes to innocent strangers at the crossroads.

 

The artwork in Lovesickness is probably some of my favorite in Ito’s work. The effect of the fog and shadows is excellent, and the body horror is fantastic. The handsome stranger is eerily beautiful. The character design reminds me of Fukusuke from the visual kei band Metronome.

 

Four other stories are included in this volume. “The Strange Hikizuri Siblings,” told in two parts, are a strange family, often at odds with each other while still trying to support each other the best they know how… to a degree. The first story, “Narumi’s Boyfriend”, shows the cruelty of the siblings and how they all take part in driving Kotani, the titular boyfriend, albeit in a forced relationship, to madness. In “The Séance”, we see family power dynamics play out in the worst possible way, with the two eldest brothers being just awful people.

 

The next story in the collection, “The Mansion of Phantom Pain”, relates the story of Kozeki, a young man employed to be a live-in caretaker for Yusuke, the son of a wealthy family. Yusuke’s condition is a strange phantom pain that extends beyond his normal body. A team of caretakers who can never leave the bricked up mansion manage the boy’s pain, day and night. When they start to experience their own maladies, and the death of Yusuke’s father, his mother still refuses to let them leave. Some of the caretakers slowly succumb to infections and hallucinations, but those remaining can’t leave, with the promise of the family’s wealth at stake, no matter how much Kozeki pleads for doctors.

 

Following that is “The Rib Woman”,  a cautionary tale of rib removal surgery and  obsession with the perfect figure. Yuki laments the lack of an hourglass figure like her friend Ruriko’s, and decides surgery is the best option. Throughout the story, Ruriko is tormented by strange and discordant music. One evening Yuki and her brother, who is also dating Ruriko, find the latter in agony on the sidewalk as she is trying to find the source of the song. They offer to help, and when they do find the source, they see a mysterious woman in the park playing a small instrument. She flees and leaves behind her instrument, which looks to be a large rib. After Yuki’s surgery, she too can hear the music. She also finds the woman and discovers there is more to the story than she believed. There is some deliciously good body horror in this one.

 

The final story in the collection is the inexplicable “Memories of Real Poop.” It’s the shortest chapter in this collection, at only four pages, but it’s memorable. I’ll just leave it at that. Highly recommended.

 

Reviewed by Lizzy Walker