A dazzling, surreal debut short story collection, Vague Predictions & Prophecies reads like an indrawn breath. Each story is sprawling and languid, crumbling the barriers between the real and the imagined. An angel falls in love with a cosmic other and is banished from heaven. Long-distance partners shack up with cyborg copies of each other, then start to lose their memories. Teenage bullies find a field full of hypnotized women, tip them like cows, and are eaten alive. Shen’s writing is a narrative compulsion, drawing you ever deeper into worlds you didn’t know you wanted to inhabit. Hypnotic, disturbing, breathtaking. I’ve never read anything like it.
Vague Predictions & Prophecies by Daisuke Shen, (List Price: $18.95, CLASH Books, 9781960988133, August 2024)
Reviewed by Charlie Marks, Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia