Houston Southard
a name that looks so fake you'll care just as little to learn it's not
Anjali Sachdeva - all the names they used for god
This is word porn. Or literary art. Whichever offends you more. Anjali's debut anthology is 9 short stories that will worm their way into your feels.
In the titular story "All The Names They Used for God" two kidnapped victims grapple with both the horrors they endured as detainees and their new ability to hypnotize men like those who unlocked their new dark savvys.
An alien takeover forces all humans to have their hands replaced with forks, save one rebel who refuses and ends up a revolutionary as the only member of the species left able to rewrite her fate.
A septuplet watches as the rest of her 6 genetically modified siblings die of debilitating illnesses. As each pass, she takes on their loss, souls, thoughts, feelings, visions. A tortured deadpool container in which her siblings live on within her.
A bereft wife wanders home in her husband's absence, losing herself in a cave she can't help but keep coming back to, avoiding reality in the damp dark, searching underground for possibilities the surface world wouldn’t offer.
A fisherman who spots a mermaid one voyage becomes obsessed with seeing her again, taking every advantage to get back to sea only to watch the mermaid's obsession with a shark.
A lot of these stories are threaded with a reactant revenge that remind you why fiction is beautiful and what each generation's word-slinging emissaries can bring to bear when their confidence and mastery of prose is fostered like Anjali's. It reminds you that revenge is the only antidote to censorship, because no one should ever have the authority to hide what she's created.
From sci-fi to american gothic to magical realism to horror, this collection is a genre disrupter maintaining cohesion through each character’s struggle with fate as they pursue the sublime, navigating the borderland between salvation and destruction.