Today, we’re pleased to present an excerpt from Willie Davis’s new collection I Can Outdance Jesus. Cara Blue Adams had this to say of the book: “Davis writes about the South, and especially rural Kentucky, in an unflinching way that weaves together humor and the darknesses of poverty, violence, addiction, and despair.” Read on for a glimpse inside Davis’s take on music, religion, and life.
Vincent Czyz’s novel Sun Eye Moon Eye traces the post-genocidal, and by extension post-apocalyptic, journey of Logan Blackfeather, a Hopi “of mixed descent.” On the surface, Logan’s story revolves around coming to terms with his father’s death; the suicide of the abusive uncle who replaced him (as titular father only); the knifing of a racist truck driver for which he is sent to prison and then a psychiatric facility; and his slow reemergence into the world via the therapeutic trinity of love—his relationship with Shawna, a woman he meets on the lam in Manhattan—art—his return to composing the music he’d given up on in the midst of trauma—and ethnic reconciliation—reclaiming his heritage from the legacy of colonialism and settlement. On a deeper level, Logan’s journey is really about his dwelling along the margin of where the waking world—one of broken families, addiction, poverty, deracination, violence—meets an animist dreamscape—southwestern geography fused to a Hopi mythography.
Chapter 19
The cabin was no bigger than a two-bedroom cube from the outside.
Morgen knocked on the door, cleared her throat, and the door opened itself.
Once inside I started feeling ill. The interior of the cabin extended many directions much farther than the exterior led on. From the outside it looked like a shack, but we were inside a mansion with multiple levels.
It’s a few days into a new month, and you can probably tell what’s next: we have some May books we’d like to recommend. Stylistically, they cover a lot of terrain; you’ll find everything from experimental short fiction to haunting meditations of contemporary politics here. Read on for some suggestions for the weeks to come.
Chapter 18
Last weekend; Friday after lunch.
Morgen walked ahead with her gun barrel aiming at the ground while scanning the horizon and sweeping the tall grass with a killer’s intensity. All morning I’d been worrying how to operate this gun. I’ve never held or used one before. It seemed pretty simple. You pump it. You point it. You make something explode like a nanoscopic Big Bang Event.
We’re pleased to present an excerpt from Shannon Robinson’s new collection The Ill-Fitting Skin, out this week from Press 53. Danielle Evans had this to say about the book: “Robinson shifts seamlessly between approaching the world with a visceral clarity and building fantasy worlds that illuminate the strangeness of our own.” This excerpt is taken from “Origin Story.”
More horror fiction should have footnotes. Bennet Sims’s A Questionable Shape has forever connected the footnote to the concept of the undead, and I seem to recall a few turning up across John Langan’s nestled narratives. Matthew Cheney’s Changes in the Land features a few as well, which is understandable given that one of its characters is, in fact, an academic. “A horror novel with an academic at its core?” you may ask. “What’s so frightening about that?”
Ecocatastrophe science fiction was supposed to be a warning, not a roadmap. We need more hopeful stories of the future.
by Cat Sparks
A climate-rattled world, ravaged by extreme weather events, is now a popular backdrop for top-shelf fiction. From Booker shortlisted The New Wilderness by Diane Cook to The Coral Bones by EJ Swift, authors are exploring the dramatic possibilities of a post-apocalyptic future. There’s something decadent yet alluring about ruined landscapes littered with once grandiose, now crumbling structures – civilisation’s reset button having been well and truly punched.
Some reckon it’s no better than we deserve, but I’m not one of them.