How to Dispatch a Human
Stories and Suggestions
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
In this daring collection of speculative fiction, Stephanie Andrea Allen attends to the lives of Black women, mostly lesbian or queer, all keenly aware of the forces seeking to consume them.
A Black lesbian working the gig economy runs into a trio of motorized scooters and helps them escape from Earth. An enchanted sleep mask gives a woman the gift of slumber, but what will it cost her? A suburban housewife is framed for murder by her homophobic neighbor. And in the follow up to "Luna 6000," a young woman investigates her mother's untimely death, and learns the truth about her family.
Stephanie Andrea Allen's How to Dispatch a Human: Stories and Suggestions is an unapologetic, often humorous, foray into the quotidian magic that envelops Black women's lives. The eleven stories in this collection are filled with characters who will entice and delight readers as they traverse the worlds around them. With a mix of fabulism, near future, and speculative fictions, Allen reminds us in exquisitely nuanced prose that the fantastical can be found amongst the ordinary.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Allen (A Failure to Communicate) crafts a venturesome but uneven collection of speculative shorts centered on the lives of Black lesbian and queer women and the unexpected danger lurking in the seemingly mundane. Each of these 11 stories presents a strange alternate world and explores subtly disquieting events, though the initial premises are frequently stronger than the execution. "Moji," one of the standouts, follows a white woman choosing Black features for her new digital avatar, with unexpected consequences. A writer lies to her girlfriend to go get coffee with a beautiful fan who turns out to be an alien predator in "Coffee Date." In "Coral D. Cat, or How to Dispatch a Human" a spoiled cat plots the murder of its owner's best friend. The concepts are original and exciting, but Allen doesn't always stick the landing, with pacing issues and inconsistent, ambiguous endings undermining the stories' intensity. The ideas are strong enough, however, that readers will be musing on them long after the final page is turned. This is a worthwhile pick for anyone interested in idea-driven speculative fiction.
