Alex Brown Reviews The Wishing Pool and Other Stories by Tananarive Due
The Wishing Pool and Other Stories, Tananarive Due (Akashic Books 978-1-63614-105-3, $23.99, 296pp, hc) April 2023.
The Wishing Pool and Other Stories marks Tananarive Due’s first solo work since her 2015 short story collection Ghost Summer and it’s a firecracker of a collection. All but two of the stories in The Wishing Pool and Other Stories have been previously published within the last few years, and like its predecessor, it covers a wide range of genres and subgenres – dystopian, Afrofuturism, horror, Southern gothic, fantasy/supernatural – and highlights the best of what Due can do.
The titular story, “The Wishing Pool,” is one of those I often think about. Joy visits her ailing father in his North Florida cabin. In the woods near the cabin is a small pool that grants wishes, and hers come true in unexpected ways. “Ghost Ship” is another one that crawled under my skin. Florida lives in a near-future world where segregation has run amok in the US and the African Americans who fled to South Africa found themselves bound in unbreakable debt peonage. Florida is sent on a job on a ship headed for the US, and things go terribly wrong very quickly.
The two new stories in the collection are “The Biographer” and the novelette “Rumpus Room”. “The Biographer” is set in the not-too-distant future post-plague in which a successful filmmaker is assigned a biographer to tell her story, but who insinuates herself so thoroughly into the filmmaker’s life that fiction and reality begin to blend in terrifying ways. In “Rumpus Room”, Kat, whose family is from Gracetown, ends up working for a white man while she puts her life back together. When she encounters a supernatural entity in the rumpus room that once belonged to the man’s dead daughter, Kat puts together the truth about what really happened to Amber.
An introduction works best when it introduces the collection as a whole and provides some framework for engaging with the work both as a whole and on the individual story level. The Gracetown and the Nayima sections of the collection contain stories all set in their respective worlds. The other two sections, Future Shock and Wishes, seem to be thematically connected. In her introduction, Due takes the reader through her journey to writing short fiction and gives us the background on a couple of the stories, but I would have liked to know more about why the stories are broken up into the sections they are and what they mean to her as the author.
Thorough readers may notice that Due mentions two stories in the acknowledgements that don’t appear in the table of contents. Apparently, it was just a simple error that wasn’t caught before the first edition was printed. I would have liked a couple extra stories, especially another never-before-published one, but overall this is a solid set of 14. There’s a little bit of everything here.
As expected from the great Tananarive Due, The Wishing Pool and Other Stories is a strong set of short stories. It would make a great introduction to her body of work for new fans especially. Due is the queen of horror noire, and she is in fine form in this collection.
Alex Brown is a librarian, author, historian, and Hugo-nominated and Ignyte award-winning critic who writes about speculative fiction, young adult fiction, librarianship, and Black history.
This review and more like it in the August 2023 issue of Locus.
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