Dark Side

Co-editors Eugen Bacon, Stephen Embleton and Cheryl S. Ntumy bring us a powerful and haunting collection of short stories from the groundbreaking Sauútiverse, following the success of Mothersound: The Sauútiverse Anthology. Sauúti Terrors tells of the doomed, the damned, the shunned, the cunning, the destroyers, the noxious, and more, in the worlds of the living, the in-between and the dead. Unravel the darkest stories in the deepest parts of the Sauúti five-planet system with its two suns, and orbiting a binary star. Bringing together African and African diaspora writers, the collection features five-time Bram Stoker Award winner and recipient of the Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award Linda D. Addison and other prominent speculative fiction authors, including T.L. Huchu, Xan van Rooyen, Jamal Hodge, Ishola Abdulwasiu Ayodele, Wole Talabi, Mazi Nwonwu, Kofi Nyameye, D.S. Falowo, Shingai Njeri Kagunda, J. Umeh, Moustapha Mbacké Diop, Miguel O. Mitchell, DaVaun Sanders and Nerine Dorman. The Flame Tree Beyond and Within short story collections bring together tales of myth and imagination by modern and contemporary writers, carefully selected by anthologists, and sometimes featuring short stories from a single author. Overall, the series presents a wide range of diverse and inclusive voices with myth, folkloric-inflected short fiction, and an emphasis on the supernatural, science fiction, the mysterious and the speculative.

I'm not so different from most people. Like everyone else, I have life goals. Goal #1: Become a real girl instead of this invisible ghost thing I currently am. Goal #2: Convince the four men I've been haunting for the past five years to pick me to be their new toy after goal one is complete. Goal #3: Figure out who/what I am and why I can't remember anything past the five years I've been haunting this quad. Goal #4: Eat popcorn. See? Perfectly normal. Sort of. Gotta start small, after all. It's not like anyone else is perfect either. Contains mature themes.

So, I've checked off some life goals and added a few new ones to my list. Goal #5: Get out of hell's belly without letting my ungrateful charges die. Goal #6: Get a new name that's more badass. Goal #7: Stop wasting my breath on lectures and start annoying the quad hell squad every time they annoy me. Fight fire with fire. Ha! Another hell pun. Goal 8: Find out who the hell killed me. I'll add more. I don't want to overwhelm myself before I even finish checking off my old goals. But seriously, I really do need a more badass name, considering how much I have to keep saving my damsels in distress. I probably shouldn't call them damsels, since they're a little murderous and all. Maybe I should add seeing a hell-certified psychologist to my list of goals. Contains mature themes.

I'm getting a little tired of completing my goals, only to have the bar raised too substantially for me to transition at a productive pace. I started off as a sad little ghost with an impossible crush on four really hot, Gothic guys with some attitude problems. Now I'm The Apocalypse, they're the Four Horsemen, and Lucifer is my messed-up daddy. Now my additional goals look like this. Goal #9: Make a deal with the Devil without getting cheated, manipulated, or tricked. Goal #10: Make my boys love me and take over the world . . . okay . . . so maybe just that first part. That second part sounds like it could take too much ambition, and I just don't have the drive for that. Goal #11: Make cookies. Goal #12: Call dibs on my favorite color. Goal #13: Find out if my siblings or my father killed me and my boys . . . Contains mature themes.

The life goals have stacked up since I started this journey as a sad, lonely little ghost. I'm not sure how things escalated so quickly from trying to be seen and heard, to bearing the weight of the world on my vain little shoulders. As a result, my goals have gotten a little more serious . . . Goal #14: Learn to take a hit without breaking or suffering some type of death. Goal #15: Decide once and for all if I'm going to save or destroy the world. I'm not sure why people put this sort of responsibility on hell-spawn like me. Goal #16: Practice my evil laugh, because all hell-spawn need a good evil laugh. Goal #17: Find and kill all the unicorns. Mwahahahahaha. Goal #18: Live to enjoy forever with the guys I sacrificed all my memories to save. Goal #19: No matter what, they don't get to die. Or I really will be the Apocalypse. We're the most screwed up collection of antiheroes the world has ever seen, because the only thing that makes me want to save the world is knowing I could lose my boys forever if I don't. It's one hell of a love story, you know? Contains mature themes.