Nowhereville

December 15, 2019
This collection of 19 short stories features tales about the way we connect to others; about cities; and about society and the role of a person within it. P. Dj�l� Clark writes of a man in 1937 seeking to record stories of the night doctors, terrifying beings said to kidnap slaves in the night for experiments. In Tariro Ndoro's story, a giant seeks to become normal-sized, only to discover that her size may have a use after all. Stephen Graham Jones writes of a bitter woman happy her mother has died, who tries to throw her mother's tumor into the river, but discovers it has a life of its own. D.A Xiolin Spires explores enchanted perfume bottles, and Wole Talabi describes the city of Lagos ridding itself of human infection. Readers will be enchanted by this collection and eagerly anticipate what the next entry will bring. The stories here are disconcerting, ambiguous, and sometimes confusing?but always intriguing and genre-bending, digging into the ways we connect to those around us.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

Starred review from November 11, 2019
The 19 unsettling, universally strong stories in this international anthology are connected by their urban settings and “weird” ethos, which editor Scott Gable defines as the “maybe state” between “the impossible of fantasy and the inevitable of science fiction.” Most of these tales could be classified as horror, but a few fall into other genres: Tariro Ndoro’s “The Cure” is a feminist tall tale, and Jeffrey Thomas’s “Vertices” offers up an alien invasion. All of the stories delve deeply into their geographical and cultural settings, and several manifest the city as a character in its own right, as with the postapocalyptic, psychedelic Portland, Ore., of Cody Goodfellow’s “The Sister City” and the human-rejecting Earth of Erica L. Satifka’s “Like Fleas on a Tired Dog’s Back.” Notably creepy tales include Stephen Graham Jones’s horrifying yet hilarious “My Lying Down Smiley Face,” and P. Djèli Clark’s eerie body horror piece, “Night Doctors.” Taken together, these stories create an uncanny, unpredictable hall of mirrors. These wonderfully strange takes on modern living are sure to resonate with fans of speculative fiction.

Starred review from January 15, 2020
A short story collection provides mixed-genre, speculative fiction, with the tales bound together by mutual love, fear, and fascination with the concept and mystique of the city. As Gable's introduction puts it, "weird" fiction lies somewhere between the "Impossible" heights of fantasy and the "Inevitable" depths of SF. This anthology, edited by the team of Gable and Dombrowski (Welcome to Miskatonic University, 2019, etc.), aims to blend these elements--not to confuse readers but to present them with something that feels true in their uncertainty. Cities, then, form the perfect backdrop, as they feature constant cycles of new growth, preservation, and demolition as well as juxtapositions of wealth and poverty, high and low culture, and a melting pot of people, languages, and ideas. Cities represent the concept that anything can happen at any time while imparting the knowledge that true divergence from the quotidian is rare. The tales range as widely as the cities in which they take place, from Enugu, Nigeria, to a futuristic urbanscape called Punktown. Some, like Nuzo Onoh's "Walk Softly, Softly," in which a mysterious shadow haunts the dreams of men and steals their genitals, invoke a sort of fabulist horror to take on complex social ills. Others, like "Y" by Maura McHugh and "Nolens Volens" by Mike Allen, throw their protagonists into situations where they have little or no control over how things will turn out, their impossible choices mirroring real-life traps. Meanwhile, in Jeffrey Thomas' "Vertices," humans must contend with aliens who've merged with their own lost explorers, raising questions about adaptation and the cost of change. Throughout these and other stories, the beautiful, horrible, and, above all, the strange intermingle, producing a host of different sorts of surprising tales. The offerings vary widely in tone and style, but they are universally thought-provoking and engaging. What's more, they complement one another in a way that's rare even for collections by single authors, much less an anthology delivering 19 disparate voices. Indeed, the effect of this collection is not so much that of a set of loosely comparable episodes but of a kaleidoscope: variegated and multifaceted yet all of a piece. Remarkably powerful urban tales, each one brilliantly in harmony with the others.

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