BookBrowse Reviews The Age of Calamities by Senaa Ahmad

BookBrowse:

Senaa Ahmad's The Age of Calamities is a strange, singular collection of short stories that thrives in the dark places.

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An eternal battle of wills ensues between King Henry VIII and an unkillable Anne Boleyn. Several clones of Napoleon live together in a small English house. A housekeeper in the 1920s allows her body to be occupied by the spirit of Joan of Arc. A murder mystery at a historian's house involves John Adams, Queen Victoria, and Marilyn Monroe.

These are all ripe, juicy story hooks, the kind that make you want to buy the book as soon as you read them on the jacket. Some of the stories live up to the promise of their premises and others fall short, but it's still a pleasure to explore each one, guided by the careful (if not unwavering) hand of Senaa Ahmad in her debut collection.

Ahmad's approach in The Age of Calamities is similar to that of Thornton Wilder's play The Skin of Our Teeth, where all of history exists in a curious in-between state: the Antrobus family simultaneously lives in mid-century America and at the start of the Ice Age, with Mr. Antrobus inventing primitive devices like the lever from the comfort of his modern circa-1942 home.

Likewise, in "Let's Play Dead," the battle between Henry VIII and the unbreakable Anne Boleyn takes on an allegorical element. Henry invents "long-barrel portable firearms" to more effectively kill his wife, and Anne invents "cardiopulmonary resuscitation [and] the telephone" to survive the attempts on her life. Stretched across centuries, their battle becomes a grand story of male violence and female ingenuity—or at the very least, female tenacity: "No one mourns the cockroaches [...] the chickens that survive their own beheadings. But she remembers."

There are some stories where this approach works better than others. "Inside the House of the Historian" is goofy fun—wouldn't you want to see John Adams and Nefertiti engage in dinnertime banter?—but it doesn't run much deeper than that. And elsewhere, Ahmad disappoints with too-cute narration ("she's dead. She's still very, very dead") and overwritten Tumblr-y prose ("their fury is the scaffolding upon which their waiting lives are begotten").

But when The Age of Calamities works, it's difficult to shake off. The best stories in the collection are generally the more horror-oriented ones, such as "The Wolves," a grim tale of lycanthropy in the heyday of the Mongol Empire. Genghis Khan utilizing an army of werewolves may sound like ridiculous pulp, but the details that make the story truly scary—the old women with slashed throats, the rich man who slayed his family to spare them the terror of the invasion—would be there with or without the wolves.

Then there's "Choose Your Own Apocalypse," the final, best, and most unique story in the collection. Not only does it have a terrific premise, essentially an eldritch horror take on the Manhattan Project, but it uses the format of a Choose Your Own Adventure story to show just how inescapable the fallout (so to speak) really was. Stay at Los Alamos, and come face to face with an irrevocably altered Dr. Oppenheimer (in the form of a man, a crow, or a swarm of wasps); leave Los Alamos, and let the desert haunt you forever like the threat of nuclear armageddon. Despite the playful premise and the occasional note of humor (on the sensation of a wasp flying down your throat: "you can't personally recommend any of it"), it comes as close to capturing the pure dread of Los Alamos as anything this side of Season Three, Episode Eight of Twin Peaks.

Despite some occasional prose missteps, there is enough creativity and vivid imagery in The Age of Calamities to make it worth your while.

This review first ran in the January 14, 2026 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.