The Wishing Pool and Other Stories is a brand new collection of fourteen, masterful tales written by American horror writer Tananarive Due. Due, a multi-award winning writer, presents a bloody tapestry of Black horror across multiple timelines, ending with Afrofuturistic stories. The celebrated author’s first collection was published in 2015; now, almost ten years later, The Wishing Pool emerges as both vision and heart drawn from character-driven perspectives ranging from a mountain lion to a toddler.

Divided into four sections, the book starts with a brutally honest introduction that, for any aspiring writer, holds more lessons than perhaps Due realizes herself. Writing about “Last Stop on Route 9,” the author states that: “In those days as a creative writing student learning from the ‘canon,’ I lost sight of myself as I began writing contemporary realism about white male protagonists having epiphanies.”

If Due lost sight of herself years ago as a student, this collection shows no signs of inauthenticity. The Wishing Pool, to me, is personal, powerful, and full of pride. Immersed in each story and its beautifully-written qualities, I imagined Due was sitting next to me besides a campfire reading them aloud as I turned each page.

Embedded within the fourteen stories are visceral experiences tinged with mystery, acceptance, and hope. After reading “Haint in the Window,” about a haunted bookseller, I was immediately reminded of the original TV series Amazing Stories (1985-87), for its ability to take a seemingly ordinary circumstance in each episode and morph it into an extraordinary, horrifying, and believable experience. Then, after reading my favorite story “Thursday Night Shift,” I got the impression that Due’s stories are full of shared, lived truths so we, the readers, never feel completely alone in the dark.

What I find refreshing about these stories is their relatability, their realism, their honesty. Due does not shy away from the problems like racism and/or violence that plague her characters; she doesn’t demonize entire families for their generational trauma, their dire financial straits, or their mistakes, either. People, in Due’s worlds, are complex and have problems, but just because they have problems to begin with doesn’t automatically mean they are as evil or dangerous as the monsters pursuing them. The author still calls the proverbial spade a spade, mind you, but approaches each character, regardless of their identity and circumstances, uniquely to relay the multifacted human complexities of familial love and hate, obligation and desire, instinct and paranoia, and so many other dichotomies against backdrops that range from the horrifying to the fantastic.

If you’re new to Tananarive Due’s stories, this collection is a perfect place to start because you don’t have to read the entire book in one sitting. In fact, I wouldn’t recommend it: these stories are the kind that will haunt you–whether you want them to or not.

The Wishing Pool and Other Stories is available from Akashic Books. The collection can be pre-ordered before its launch date on August 6th, and will be offered wherever books are sold.


FlamesRising.com received an advance complementary copy of this collection for review from the publisher, Akashic Books. Some links in this post are Amazon affiliated.

Tags | Fiction, horror, short-stories