A dazzling debut collection of speculative short fiction. If you’re a fan of Octavia Butler, Dean Koontz or Kelly Link you’ll enjoy this debut short story collection by Michele Tracy Berger. Playful and provocative, these speculative stories cover a wide territory including sci-fi, contemporary fantasy, weird, horror and magical realism. The stories span horror, fantasy, science fiction, and magical realism, but are always grounded in very real characters and beautifully rendered, distinctive communities. Often thematically centered on the lives of women and girls, especially women of color and their experiences of vulnerability and outsider status, these stories are often playful and always provocative. Fifteen stories invite you to get comfortable in the dark, to consider freedom and sacrifice, trust and betrayal, otherness, and safety. Marisol, an aspiring jewelry artist is haunted by a fast-food icon. Chevella, a self-aware doll, finds herself in 1950s America playing a key role in the Civil Rights Movement. Lindsay, a Black girl in 1970s America “wins” an extraterrestrial in a national contest only to find her family’s life upended. Chelsea and Jessa, two sisters, fight about what a strange child means for their family. A meat grinder appears in a magical forest and chaos ensues. All this and more.
Author
Michele Tracy Berger is a professor, a creative writer, and a pug-lover. Her main love is writing science fiction though she also is known to write poetry and creative nonfiction, too. Her fiction has appeared in UnCommon Origins: A Collection of Gods, Monsters, Nature and Science by Fighting Monkey Press, You Don’t Say: Stories in the Second Person by Ink Monkey Press, Flying South: A Literary Journal, 100wordstory, Thing Magazine, and The Red Clay Review. Her sci-fi novella, Reenu-You is recently published from Book Smugglers Publishing. Her nonfiction writing and poetry has appeared in The Chapel Hill News, The Red Clay Review, Glint Literary Journal, Oracle: Fine Arts Review, Trivia: Voices of Feminism, The Feminist Wire, Ms., Carolina Woman Magazine, and Western North Carolina Woman, A Letter to My Mom, and various zines. Michele is completely undone by the sight of pugs and has to restrain herself from collecting any item they appear on. She lives in Pittsboro, North Carolina with her partner Tim.
