Octavia Butler’s *Bloodchild and Other Stories*
a profane harvest of vignettes sweetened to the point of numb rupture. a rapid succession of philosophical dogfights around which ring ruptured identity, hallucination, torture, translation, complicity, and profane couplings all running havoc and haphazard over the full range of idealism, pragmatism, spiritual unrest and--occasionally--gasping bouts of immanent liberation. not nearly as vastly textured as the novels for which she is rightly considered a grandmaster of speculative literature, this collection of stories are nevertheless richly haunted, possessed, even stumbling under the weight of compulsions as guttural as they are cerebral. for the intense succession of rough, fecund, and decidedly anti-liberal exercises in multiplicity, Butler's work is as critical now as it ever has been.
First published October 6, 2021.