Jackal, Jackal: Tales of the Dark and Fantastic
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
From Shirley Jackson award-nominated author Tobi Ogundiran, comes a highly anticipated debut collection of stories full of magic and wonder and breathtaking imagination!
In "The Lady of the Yellow-Painted Library" -- featured in Levar Burton Reads -- a hapless salesman flees the otherworldly librarian hell-bent on retrieving her lost library book.
"The Tale of Jaja and Canti" sees Ogundiran riffing off of Pinocchio. But this wooden boy doesn't seek to become real. Wanting to be loved, he journeys the world in search of his mother-an ancient and powerful entity who is best not sought out.
"The Goatkeeper's Harvest" contains echoes of Lovecraft, where a young mother living on a farm finds that goats have broken into her barn and are devouring all her tubers. As she chases them off with a rake, a woman appears claiming the goats are her children, and that the young woman has killed one of them and must pay the price: a goat for a goat.
These and other tales of the dark and fantastic await.
"Superb weird-fantasy fictions... an unfailing capacity for surprise." -Publishers Weekly, Top 10 Summer Read
"These stories will captivate readers with their haunting atmosphere, confident voice, and immersive settings." -Becky Spratford, Booklist
"Jackal, Jackal is a great showcase of Ogundiran's consistency and strengths of a storyteller and dark fabulist. Forget logic. These are stories you are meant to feel. Think Grimm by way of Amos Tutuola. Stephen King meets Cyprian Ekwensi." -Wole Talabi, Locus magazine
"Ogundiran's tales revel in small moments that create big ripples. Jackal, Jackal is a collection of such stories, characters grasping at a wish in their own unique, earnest way. An exciting yet intimate collection from a writer who continues to surprise and delight." -Suyi Davies Okungbowa, Author of The Nameless Republic trilogy
"Jackal, Jackal is an astonishing debut collection with real teeth." -Priya Sharma, Author of Pomegranates
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nothing is what it seems in Ogundiran's impressive debut collection of 18 horror and dark fantasy stories. Despite the wide range of settings, from modern Lagos, Paris, and Moscow to far-flung fantasy worlds, sentient forests, and harmattan-shrouded deserts, the recurring themes and motifs threaded throughout lend the whole a strong sense of cohesion. The stories often feel like modern parables or cautionary tales, exploring the dangers of knowledge and ignorance alike and the impermanence of bodies and identities. Characters find themselves transformed into animals ("Jackal, Jackal"), stone ("The Clockmaker and His Daughter"), salt ("Faêl"), and wood ("The Tale of Jaja and Canti"), or else replaced by sinister spirits ("Lagbaja"). Highlights include the rollicking and deeply affecting "Midnight in Moscow," which riffs on the folktale of Baba Yaga; the righteously angry and powerful anticolonial epistolary tale "Here Sits His Ignominy"; and the truly horrifying yet startlingly funny "In the Smile Place," which reads like a creepypasta. Fans of speculative shorts are in for a treat.
