If you want to see how gloriously messy short stories can get, “Evil Flowers” by Gunnhild Oyehaug is a great place to start. A Norwegian poet and author with a distinctly Dadaist sensibility, Oyehaug seems to delight in keeping you off-balance. When “Evil Flowers,” which was translated by Kari Dickson, isn’t pranking Baudelaire (whose famous volume of poetry “Les Fleurs du mal” provides its title), it’s pulling the rug out from under the reader in the style of a Monty Python sketch, except gentler and even weirder.
More than one story in this book begins with its narrator lodging a formal protest against the story that just ended, and non-sequiturs abound. A story about a crow randomly turning into a dove suddenly pivots and becomes a tale of how the person who witnessed this transformation later fell in love. Leeches eat through fiber-optic cables only to become celebrities, interviewed on television. It’s all delightfully silly and exceedingly strange.
When it comes to keeping you guessing, Sarah Pinsker is no slouch. Her new collection, “Lost Places,” puts extremely memorable characters into bewildering situations. As that “lost” in the title suggests, many of these stories involve people who’ve misplaced themselves: in the wilderness, in the fog of dementia, in strange circumstances. Pinsker’s characters always make the best of tricky situations, which only makes their struggles in her topsy-turvy worlds more heartbreaking.
Some the stories in “Lost Places” are unsettling: There are swimming holes that make people disappear, and a sinister version of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” whose host tells stories that warp the fates of the children in his studio audience. But there are also stirring tales of rebellion, in which ordinary people escape from confinement, organize their neighbors to protest injustice and speak out against abuses.
Curses, shape-shifters and meddlesome gods abound in “Drinking From Graveyard Wells” by Yvette Lisa Ndlovu, a searing collection of stories about Black women in tough situations. Ndlovu draws on southern African traditions, and the results are endlessly thrilling. (Full disclosure: Ndlovu studied at Clarion West, a workshop where I was an instructor for a week.) Many of the stories in “Graveyard Wells” are set in Zimbabwe, and the brutal legacy of British colonialism seeps into everything.
Ndlovu has a gift for clever conceits and knife-twist endings. In one of her stories, a woman dies and her husband can’t bury her until he finishes paying off her bride price to her birth family, so she risks turning into a vengeful spirit called a ngozi. In another, the goddess of wealth blesses a student with endless abundance, but the blessing soon becomes a curse. As one of her characters says, “It is this world that makes monsters of us all.”
To glimpse the full potential of short fiction, you’ll have to check out “New Suns 2,” an anthology of “original speculative fiction by people of color” edited by Nisi Shawl. The first volume of “New Suns” won the World Fantasy, Locus, IGNYTE and British Fantasy awards, and this volume more than holds its own. Almost every story in the collection punches above its weight.
In these pages you’ll encounter giant owls, self-aware space probes, and a magical house that is endless and has a mind of its own. Some of genre’s most exciting new authors are represented here, including Darcie Little Badger, Nghi Vo and Saad Hossain. An anthology of stories by multiple authors can sometimes leave you wanting more of some voices, and less of others, but “New Suns 2” offers a composite picture of the best work being done in genre fiction right now.
Tananarive Due is the master of Black horror, even teaching a class where Jordan Peele guest-lectured. So her new collection, “The Wishing Pool,” out in mid-April, is a major treat, full of major scares. Due excels at twist endings but also brilliantly creates an atmosphere of creeping dread in which you know something terrible is coming.
“The Wishing Pool” is helpfully divided into four sections, and each feels like a movement in a symphony. There are classic tales of horror, then a series of stories set in a Florida town where the swamp tends to swallow people up; the final two sections shift to science fiction about post-apocalyptic futures. (These last sections include pandemic stories, written before 2020, which hit harder now.) Due shows just how much territory she can cover in one short book and just how versatile terrifying tales can be.
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