Moonflower, Nightshade, All the Hours of the Day: Stories

In this debut collection of short stories by the winner of the Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize, the sly fabulism of JD Scott’s fiction casts its own peculiar spell upon the reader as it outlines a world unsettlingly similar to our own. Scott troubles the line between what is literary and genre, fairy tale and parable.   In one story, a perfumer keeps his boyfriend close at hand by dosing him with precise measures of poison. In another, a comical domestic drama hinges upon the life and death of an ancient chinchilla. Scott pushes liminality with magical scrolls, a drowned twin returning from the sea, and a witty retelling of the Crucifixion where a gym bunny chops down a tree in the Garden of Eden—only to transform the wood into a cross for himself.   The collection ends with an epic novella in which a heroic teenager comes of age inside an otherworldly shopping mall that spans the entire globe. Visceral, dreamlike, and full of dazzling prose: announces the arrival of a distinctive talent who challenges us to see our own endless possibilities—to find luminescence inside and beyond the shadows.