An American Haunting: Uncanny Fiction

Mysticism, myth, and the uncanny thread through the work of Morowa Yejidé and Jason Ockert. Yejidé’s novel Creatures of Passage is set in the otherworldly landscapes of 1977 Washington, D.C., complete with reluctant ghosts and flawed super-humans. The Washington Post says “Yejidé’s writing captures both real news and spiritual truths with the deftness and capacious imagination of her writing foremothers: Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison and N.K. Jemisin.” Ockert’s darkly surreal collection Shadowselves follows characters who are perilously close to an edge they can’t see. George Saunders says, “Ockert’s voice is quirky, funny, and totally original―it conveys, in these dreamlike, virtuosic stories, a strange and vulnerable kindness you haven’t read before.”