Ananda Lima crossed my radar with “Ghost Story“, which was published in Electric Lit when this book came out. I loved the way the story combined heavy literary fiction themes (of family, politics and religion) with the supernatural – the ghost in the story was less harrowing than what was going on among the living. That story is as much about being away from home and being an immigrant in the US in the age of Trump, as it is about the ghost of the writer haunting her poor mother.

That story included in this book, and “Ghost Story” is a good proxy for gauging whether you’ll like Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil, her debut collection. It would be a mistake to expect this to be a collection of horror stories for spooky season. This is very much literary fiction at a Halloween party as opposed to erudite horror. The stories in Craft are also at times poignant, ironic and frequently funny, though usually in a somewhat off-kilter way.

Ananda Lima is a Brazilian immigrant to America, and that informs several stories in this book. Anxiety about identity, racial profiling, ICE deportations, the pandemic, and the social and political environment back in Brazil are woven in throughout the stories, often posing a larger threat than anything supernatural or ghastly.

The organizing concept here is that the central character, “the writer”, slept with the Devil in her 20s, and he plays a role at key points throughout her life. The eight short stories are interspersed with moments of the writer’s life when the Devil shows up to nudge events in a certain direction. Though the short stories are all strong enough to stand on their own, these episodes bring some cohesion to the stories and make them all stronger — after reading the book I found myself thinking about that connective tissue as much as the stories themselves.

If you’re looking for a Paul Tremblay or Clive Barker experience, this ain’t it. These stories read like the output of an MFA (and they are, Lima’s is from Rutgers) — ambitious and weird, and not always clear. In “Antropófaga”, for example, the protagonist is addicted to the vending machine at work, which dispenses tiny Americans that she eats. I can’t describe it better than that, it’s weird and creepy and I had dreams about it – you can read that one here.

Lima’s writing is lush and lyrical. She draws a lot on the immigrant experience in contemporary America (maybe her own, or that of others) to create the stress and anxiety in these stories to excellent effect. Several of the stories have lingered in my mind days after finishing the book. It’s a fantastic debut collection.

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