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The mundane becomes sinister in a disquieting story collection from the author of The Grip of It.
In Jac Jemc's dislocating second story collection, False Bingo, we watch as sinister forces―some supernatural, some of this earth, some real and some not―work their ways into the mundanity of everyday life.
In "Strange Loop," an outcast attempting to escape an unnamed mistake spends his days taxiderming animals, while in "Delivery," a family watches as their dementia-addled, basement-dwelling father succumbs to an online shopping addiction. "Don't Let's" finds a woman, recently freed from an abusive relationship, living in an isolated vacation home in the South that might be haunted by breath-stealing ghosts.
Fueled by paranoia and visceral suspense, and crafted with masterful restraint, these seventeen stories explore what happens when our fears cross over into the real, if only for a fleeting moment. Identities are stolen, alternate universes are revealed, and innocence is lost as the consequences of minor, seemingly harmless decisions erupt to sabotage a false sense of stability. "This is not a morality tale about the goodness of one character triumphing over the bad of another," the sadistic narrator of "Pastoral" announces. Rather, False Bingo is a collection of realist fables exploring how conflicting moralities can coexist: the good, the bad, the indecipherable.
"[E]lectric, nimble...This constantly shifting collection will leave readers beguiled." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"[A] collection that will disappoint a reader looking for a tightly controlled narrative arc but delight one willing to learn how these particular stories want to be read. Tense, well-imagined stories whose tendencies to unravel mirror the characters they chronicle." - Kirkus Reviews
"20 electrifying short stories, some no longer than a few pages, but every one odd and memorable for wildly different reasons...A writer compared to Shirley Jackson and Henry James, Jemc continues to solidify her standing as a talented writer of the uncanny, the horrifying, and the hilarious." - Booklist
This information about False Bingo was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jac Jemc is the author of My Only Wife, a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and winner of the Paula Anderson Book Award; the short-story collection A Different Bed Every Time; and the novel The Grip of It, named a finalist for the Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction and a recommended read by NYLON, W, Marie Claire, and Entertainment Weekly. She teaches at Northeastern Illinois University and StoryStudio Chicago, as well as online at Writers & Books and the Loft Literary Center, and she is the web nonfiction editor for Hobart.
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