PRAISE FOR MICAH DEAN HICKS
“I am not sure where Micah Dean Hicks comes from – maybe he fell flaming from space or maybe he rose damply from a swamp or maybe a mountain cracked open and he rolled out – but he does not see the world or use language or understand people like the rest of us. His stories, so original, so peculiarly extraordinary, will haunt and move you.”
— BENJAMIN PERCY
winner of the Whiting Award
and author of Red Moon
“Stories that feel like they were found in the earth, like the bones of some ancient, mythic creature.”
— BEN LOORY
author of Stories for Nighttime
and Some For the Day
“Micah Dean Hicks is to short story writing what director Tim Burton is to film making – a zany Aladdin from Arkansas, enamored of bizarre fables and misfit fantasies, his skull a-boil with magical thinking.”
— BOB SHACOCHIS
winner of the National Book Award
and author of Conversations with Cuba
“The beguiling stories in Electricity & Other Dreams are in their own category, which might be described as Southern gothic meets tall tale meets dirty realism. In these magical yet down-to-earth stories we meet an old man made out of cans, an electrician who makes light simply by touching a bulb, a weatherman who arranges his own weather, a plumber who also gets rid of ghosts. Fortune cookie fortunes actually come true, alligators work in a factory, and Japanese warlords battle on a jet plane. And then there’s the killer crawfish. Every story in this fantastic collection is gorgeously gritty and lots of fun. Micah Dean Hicks is a true original.”
— ELIZABETH STUCKEY-FRENCH
O. Henry Award-winner
and author of The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady
“In this unsettling, impressive collection, Micah Dean Hicks effortlessly mixes realism, the fantastical, and the darkly gritty to great effect. These stories feel layered, lived-in, timeless. I felt in reading them as if I was receiving an early glimpse of a unique voice, and an important one. I loved it.”
— JEFF VANDERMEER
two-time winner of the World Fantasy Award
and author of Finch
“Call it southern gothic, or call it magic realism, this debut story collection from native Arkansan Hicks includes more than two dozen exceedingly brief stories, each one a fantastic blend of local folklore and twentieth-century legend. Hicks has a gift for jamming contemporary concerns into mythic time, whether it’s a witch who ruins Miss Teen Georgia’s promising future, or the pirate Bluebeard checking out cashiers at the supermarket. In one story an Iraqi contractor purchases a cursed ring possessed by a djinn, with otherworldly results. Elsewhere, three alligator-hunting brothers wax philosophical as their trophies transform unexpectedly into discombobulated humans. At times macabre and often hilarious, the book’s catalog of strange creatures ranges from crawfish gunfighters who cannibalize their own kind, to Japanese warlords who board a commercial jet, to a weatherman who conjures storms rather than just reporting their whereabouts. Hicks’ masterful combination of familiar scenes with uncanny creations reads like the love child of Eudora Welty and Edgar Allan Poe, or what it might have been like if Tim Burton had directed Beasts of the Southern Wild.”
— DIEGO BÁEZ
Booklist
