Epeolatry Book Review: Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil by Ananda Lima
Disclosure:
Our reviews may contain affiliate links. If you purchase something through the links in this article we may receive a small commission or referral fee. This happens without any additional cost to you.
Title: Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil
Author: Ananda Lima
Genre: Horror Short Stories, Fantasy Anthologies, Contemporary Horror
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Date: 23rd July, 2024
Synopsis: Strange, intimate, haunted, and hungry―Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil is an intoxicating and surreal fiction debut by award-winning author Ananda Lima.
“An astounding new voice.” ―ERIC LaROCCA • “I love it so much.” ―KELLY LINK • “Trippy, eerie, wry, and always profound.” ―JOHN KEENE • “Incredible. Truly wondrous.” ―KEVIN WILSON • “Heart-wrenching and wickedly funny.” ―GWEN KIRBY • “Propulsive, uncanny, and expertly built.” ―JULIA FINE
At a Halloween party in 1999, a writer slept with the devil. She sees him again and again throughout her life and she writes stories for him about things that are both impossible and true.
Lima lures readers into surreal pockets of the United States and Brazil where they’ll find bite-size Americans in vending machines and the ghosts of people who are not dead. Once there, she speaks to modern Brazilian-American immigrant experiences–of ambition, fear, longing, and belonging―and reveals the porousness of storytelling and of the places we call home.
With humor, an exquisite imagination, and a voice praised as “singular and wise and fresh” (Cathy Park Hong), Lima joins the literary lineage of Bulgakov and Lispector and the company of writers today like Ted Chiang, Carmen Maria Machado, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah.
Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil includes: “Rapture,” “Ghost Story,” “Tropicália,” “Antropógaga,” “Idle Hands,” “Rent,” “Porcelain,” “Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory,” and “Hasselblad.”
A great next read for fans of Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties and V. E. Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.
Recommended reading by Chicago Review of Books, Electric Literature, The Kenyon Review, and more!
You know how when you’re in an art museum and it’s all still and quiet and the lights are dim and you feel like someone has hit pause on your journey through time and space and yet there’s this surreal haunting energy in motion all around you, courtesy of the artwork on the walls.
No?
Okay, let me try again.
One of Ananda Lima’s previously published poems is titled “Arroyo”, and here in New Mexico there’s arroyos all over the place, both artificially constructed and naturally occurring. The naturally occurring ones are pretty static (like how most people, including me, view the desert).
Until they’re not.
It hadn’t even been raining that hard, or even for very long, in Tesuque when within an eyeblink a roaring torrent of water was pouring down the arroyo, and the barely-a-creek had overflowed the steep banks and pushed mud and all sorts of debris in front of it.
This is what it felt like when reading Ananda Lima’s story collection. Like you are a static object around which currents ebb and flow—the currents being this creator’s storytelling that is both wondrously spooky and terrifyingly awesome.
The opening story is evocative in a way that perhaps only an 80s “child” (and by “child” I mean about the same age as the twenty-something main character) can relate. The magic of that time, the magic of the music; magic of meeting the band.
(Devilish magic, indeed.)
That was what made the undercurrents in Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil so poignant. A haunting whisper of a shared lived experience, and yet, of course, different enough to not strike too close to the bone…or the heart.
It’s the art hanging on the walls of the gallery…observing someone else’s pathway through life, finding it both relatable and yet surreal in their unfamiliarity. Like a dream you might have dreamt once, but can barely remember, and it may have been like Lima writes “my memories merge a little with dreams, movies, music clips”.
Reading this book felt like an echo, and I hadn’t felt that serendipitous/synchronous magic for many years now. In fact, I didn’t remember reading about the art gallery the first readerly go-round and then there it was, and I gasped because of what I wrote at the beginning of this review.
See?
No?
Oh well, follow the writer-within-a-writer through your own twisty is-the-past-the-future, sometimes darkly comedic journey yourself.
And come find me in the art gallery when you’re done.
/5
- About the Author
- Latest Posts
“Cat Whisperer” Kirsten Lee Barger (they/them) has written articles on everything from cats to a piece about the “Di Wae Powa: They Came Back” homecoming event (Special thanks to Executive Director Karl Duncan and the Poeh Cultural Center: https://poehcenter.org/diwaepowa/.). In addition to befriending numerous feral cats (as well as skunks, chipmunks, and squirrels), they are currently getting a master’s in professional science (wildlife conservation & advocacy/environmental branding & marketing) from Unity Environmental University. Visit them on LinkedIn, here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kirsten-lee-barger-4a984a49/.
