The Memphis-born New York Times bestselling author Eric Jerome Dickey died on Sunday, January 3rd, in Los Angeles after battling a long illness. Dickey was 59.

His longtime publisher, Dutton, said: “Eric Jerome Dickey loved being a writer and all that it encompassed. He loved challenging himself with each book; he adored his readers and beloved fans and was always grateful for his success. We are proud to have been his publisher over the span of his award-winning career. He will truly be missed.”

Though the author was a resident of Los Angeles, California, he originally hailed from Memphis and was a graduate of the University of Memphis (then Memphis State). I had the opportunity to speak with Dickey in early 2020, at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, and I was blown away by his charm, humor, intelligence, and incredible generosity with his time. We spoke for almost two hours, not just about his most recent novel, The Business of Lovers, but about social distancing, Memphis and L.A., and how the coronavirus might change romance in fiction.

While the Flyer's office was closed for the winter holidays last week, I received an email from one of Dickey’s many ardent fans who was trying to track down hardbound copies of Dickey’s early novels. Since the announcement today of his passing, heartfelt tributes from fans and other authors have appeared on social media. 

Prolific and hardworking, Dickey was the author of 29 novels. Recently, his debut novel, Sister, Sister, was listed as one of Essence’s “50 Most Impactful Black Books of the Last 50 Years,” and USA Today featured him on their list of “100 Black Novelists and Fiction Writers You Should Read.” More than seven million of his books have been published worldwide.

In 1994, Dickey’s first published short story, “Thirteen,” appeared in the IBWA’s River Crossings: Voices of the Diaspora: An Anthology on the International Black Experience. Soon after, Sara Camilli, of the Sara Camilli Agency, signed Dickey’s first novel and became an advocate for his work and a close friend. Dickey published his first book, Sister, Sister, with Dutton in 1996, and the imprint remained his publishing home as he made a name for himself in the field of contemporary urban fiction. Camilli said, “Eric and I have been together since the start of both of our careers. He’s been like a member of our family. His death leaves a large void not only in the literary world but in our lives as well. He was a writer’s writer — always striving to make everything he wrote the best it could be.”

Several of Dickey’s novels were nominated for the NAACP Image Awards, and his 2014 novel, A Wanted Woman, won the NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Literary Work. Dickey was also honored with awards for Best Contemporary Fiction and Author of the Year (Male) at the 2006 African American Literary Award Show and nominated for Storyteller of the Year at the first annual Essence Literary Awards in 2008. He was the author of a six-issue miniseries of comic books for Marvel Enterprises, and he contributed to multiple anthologies, including Got to Be Real: Four Original Love Stories, Mothers and Sons, and others. He also wrote the screenplay for the movie Cappuccino. Dickey’s final novel, The Son of Mr. Suleman, will be published on April 20, 2021.

Dickey leaves behind four daughters. Due to COVID-19, there will be no services at this time.

Memphis looms large in the just-announced Marvel Black Panther prose anthology, Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda, due next February. Not that T’Challa is hanging out on Beale Street, taking in a view of the Mississippi, or attending art shows at the CMPLX. No, it’s that so many Memphis authors have contributed to the collection.

Memphians all, poet/editor/author Sheree Renée Thomas, teacher/author Danian Darrell Jerry, and FIYAH magazine publisher and Memphis Flyer contributor Troy L. Wiggins are all featured in the anthology, which is edited by Memphis/Holly Springs native Jesse J. Holland.

“I was like, ‘This is a dream that I wouldn’t have said aloud.’ I was thrilled. Can this year get any crazier?” says Thomas, who is having something of a banner year. Her short story collection, Nine Bar Blues, was published in spring (and many stories are eligible for awards), she contributed to the Slay vampire anthology, and was named the new editor of long-running The Magazine of Fantasy & Science-Fiction. “It’s a 20-plus year overnight success. I spent years quietly just working, publishing, of course, but not getting huge fanfare beyond the anthologies,” Thomas says. “That’s how it is for everyone, but we focus on the exceptions.

“Writing is a long game. You’ve got to be a long distance runner. It’s one thing my mentor Arthur Flowers has always said,” she continues. “It may be a while before you’re published in something your family recognizes.”

But if there’s a list of high-profile recognizable characters, Black Panther is indisputably on it. Though Thomas is a longtime reader of sci-fi and fantasy, she says she’s newer to the world of comics. “I wasn’t able to read comics regularly as a child. [It was], ‘Here’s your library card, go to the library.’” But, the author says, she is a fan of the character. In fact, she dressed up to attend the 2018 screening of Black Panther and even made it onto some news clips about the night. “They show me in my Wakanda outfit with a huge afro. I was ready for Wakanda,” Thomas says with a laugh. And anyone who’s read her work can attest that Thomas will be right at home in the Afrofuturism of Wakanda.

“When Chadwick Boseman passed, that was a big blow to everyone,” she continues, remembering the charismatic Black Panther star who passed away in August of this year. “I had to take a moment to kind of regroup from that. I think it had an effect on us. We were so hoping that he would be able to enjoy the book. So it put new passion into the writing to honor his amazing performance. He embodied the Black Panther.”

Of course, writing for Marvel means digging into decades of history. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby debuted the character of T’Challa in 1966. “When I was writing my story I had to do a lot of research,” Thomas says. “You’re not using the Marvel Universe; you’re using the canon. And of course, the new story threads that are being written out by Ta-Nehisi Coates and others.” (Note: Coates’ The Water Dancer was my favorite novel of 2019, and his ongoing run on Black Panther makes for some of the most exciting and challenging comics I’ve ever read.)

“I’ve always been a big Marvel fan,” says Danian Darrell Jerry. “Not just Black Panther, but anything they’ve put out — X-Men, Spider-Man, Avengers, Doctor Strange. So this is a great opportunity for me to get in there and tap into some of the things I imagined as a child. It’s a little surreal, but it’s fun.”

Jerry is a native Memphian with deep roots in the city’s creative scenes. He’s a hip-hop artist who works with the Iron Mic Coalition. “I’ve always been interested in reading and books and comics, but I’ve always been interested in the arts in general,” he says. What’s more, Jerry works here to help promote literacy and an appreciation for literature — from childhood on to adulthood.

He has his MFA from the University of Memphis, where he now works as an adjunct English instructor teaching composition and literature classes. “This last semester I got a chance to teach Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me in my lit classes. [It was great] taking my literature class and adding a BIPOC focus and lens to it, examining hard questions on race relations in class, which was very productive.”

Memphis-based fans of the strange and unusual have to have a healthy interest in curses. Flyer film editor Chris McCoy’s documentary about the beloved alternative music club Antenna begins with drummer Ross Johnson stating, plainly, that Memphis is cursed. Then there’s the allegedly haunted Ernestine & Hazel’s, the ghost girl of the Orpheum, and that giant-sized yellow fever mural at the Pink Palace that’s so spooky it looks like a Swedish death-metal album cover. Not to mention the crystal skull of the pyramid.

To refresh, a crystal skull was reported to have been installed in the Pyramid, and that bit of wild rumor was actually true. It turns out that the skull was installed under the direction of Isaac Tigrett, cofounder of the Hard Rock Cafe, New Age fan and disciple of guru Sri Baba, and son of Pyramid guiding light and patron John Tigrett. Isaac said the skull was intended to be part of a promotion called “The Egyptian Time Capsule.” Weird, right? Well, yes, but also, unexplainably, so very Memphis.

All this is a long way to say that when the kind folks at Quirk Books sent me a copy of Edgar Award-winning travel writer, novelist, and blogger J.W. Ocker’s new Cursed Objects, I was already primed to appreciate it.

Cursed Objects is broken into sections based on the location of the cursed object in question — in a museum, a private collection, or the world wide web (think chain emails). The chapters are titled things like “Lurking in Homes,” “Under Glass,” and “In the Graveyard”; and if that doesn’t get you ready for spooky season, what will?

“I hate to be the one to tell you this, but many seemingly innocuous objects will make your life suck,” Ocker writes in the book’s introduction. His tone throughout is one of the highlights — it’s what you might call “humorously journalistic.” Cursed Objects is well researched, but even the best-laid plans can fall apart with shoddy delivery. Luckily for the reader, that’s where the author shines. One gets the feeling that Ocker is sharing an inside joke — and marveling that people could be foolish enough to keep such a plainly cursed object in the home or workplace.

Ocker’s subjects range from the Hope Diamond to the Basano Vase and the Ring of Silvianus — a Roman artifact believed to have inspired J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. The entry about the Black Aggie statue in Druid Ridge Cemetery in Pikesville, Maryland, is especially chilling. “They say her eyes glow red at night and that if you look into them, you’ll go blind,” the author writes.

The extravagantly violent curses that grace the Björketoro Runestone, an Iron Age monolith in Sweden, are so vile they’re almost funny. The runestone is made even more interesting by the mystery surrounding it — no one knows quite what purpose it served or why it needed to be protected with such lavishly applied written curses. Was it a gravestone marking the grave of a proto-Viking? Or perhaps it was a cenotaph (a grave marker honoring someone whose remains are elsewhere), or a tribute to Odin. The only sure thing is that, superstitious or not, it probably isn’t worth the risk to mess with the thing.

Israeli-born, Memphis-based author and anesthesiologist Dr. Shira Shiloah knows a thing or two about the world of medicine. She is, after all, a doctor. And as an anesthesiologist, much of her work is done in the operating room, where mistakes can be costly. So her debut medical thriller, Emergence, though fiction, hinges on very realistic and immediate stakes. Shiloah will celebrate the release of Emergence with a virtual event accessible via her author Facebook page at Shira Shiloah, MD. The virtual launch party is Tuesday, September 15th, 7:30-8 p.m.

“I never thought I would be a lifelong Memphian, but the city has been really good to me,” Shiloah says. Her family emigrated from Israel when she was three years old, and she’s spent much of her life since then in Memphis. "I went to grade school, high school [in Memphis], and I came back here for medical school.”

Shiloah completed her residency at Northwestern University in Chicago, where she switched her focus from OBGYN to anesthesiology. “I liked the critical care aspect of it,” she says. “It’s pretty much all operating room.”

She says that her time in medical school and completing her residency were the only times in her life that she couldn’t make time to read for pleasure. “I didn’t know I was going to be a writer, but I was an avid reader. You know the kind of kid who would take books from the library and then finish the first book before they even got to the house? That was me.”

So how did Shiloah’s career as a writer get started? It all comes back to her medical career. “I was touched by a patient encounter and I felt like I had to write it down. It became a short story called ‘Liquid Courage,’ and I submitted it to a writing contest for physicians. And it actually placed third. I realized how much I enjoyed that whole process.” So Shiloah started attending writing conferences, soaking up trade talk from the experts. She also started pulling apart and reworking “Liquid Courage.” She gave the characters more depth and began to see that it would work as a novel. 

With its motifs of the trustworthiness of doctors and whistleblowers, Emergence feels especially timely, though Shiloah wasn’t intending to comment on current events. Rather, she hoped to write a satisfying thriller with a strong female protagonist, to show off her adopted hometown of Memphis (where the novel is set), and to cast some light on the dynamics of the operating room. “I wanted to put out a perspective as a female physician and an anesthesiologist,” she says. “I don’t think an anesthesiologist’s story is told very often or very well. The surgeon’s not barking orders. The surgeon’s following orders because there’s a crisis.”

Of course, though its genesis is rooted in the seed of Shiloah’s experience, she says to remember that the best writing advice is to "look out to the window, not in a mirror.” Emergence, she says, is fiction, not autobiography. And except for their shared career and a certain similarity in the alliteration in their names, Shiloah and the fictional Dr. Roxanne Roth are very different. “As far as my colleagues and I, it’s a very good working relationship,” she says. “It’s a team.”

“You have to trust the person on the other side of the sterile sheets,” Shiloah says. And as for Emergence’s Dr. Roxanne Roth, well, “She’s encountering another surgeon that she can’t trust.”

One of my earliest memories is of my dad sitting at the kitchen table in the weeks leading up to a Halloween, telling me about mass hysteria. He used to love talking about the famous Mercury Theatre on the Air’s radio adaptation — starring and directed by Orson Welles — of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. “People really flipped,” I remember him saying. “They actually thought Martians were invading.”

A year or two later, I stayed up all night reading The War of the Worlds for myself. I read until the sun rose because I was too afraid to go to sleep. (Cut me a break — I was like 8 years old.) All this is a long way to say that a few of my earliest memories as a fan of popular fiction involve Martians. The same is probably true for anyone who soaked up vintage sci-fi as a kid.

But still, it wasn’t until I read Marc Hartzman’s new encyclopedic account of Mars in history and pop culture that I realized just how much our planet’s little red neighbor has infiltrated my consciousness. Marvin the Martian, Mars Attacks!, David Bowie’s “Life on Mars?,” Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles — Mars is everywhere*, and Marc Hartzman’s The Big Book of Mars (Quirk Books) is a full catalogue of our encounters, in fact and fiction, with the red planet.

Subtitled From Ancient Egypt to The Martian, a Deep-Space Dive into Our Obsession with the Red Planet, Hartzman’s new book does make a case that humans’ interest with Mars surpasses that of any of our other planetary neighbors. But it’s only in the sheer volume of material collected in The Big Book of Mars that Hartzman makes his case. There’s no argument, rather just an overview of a collective fascination.

Though I immediately flipped to the “Mars Invades Pop Culture” section looking for (and finding) references to Bradbury and Bowie, Hartzman doesn’t neglect humanity’s real-world interactions with its neighbor. From early astronomy to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labs (JPL), the Mariner and Viking missions, and the rovers spelling out “J-P-L” in the oxidized sand in Morse Code, The Big Book of Mars presents the history of Mars observation and exploration in easily digestible segments. It’s particularly delightful to read about our changing opinions about the possibility of life on Mars — and what that life might resemble.

In 1930, Hartzman writes, one journalist reporting for Popular Science Monthly hypothesized that Mars was populated by “herds of beaver-creatures.” He explained their halted evolution by saying, “There seems no reason to believe that Martian life has gone farther than that.” Earlier writers speculated Martian society would be far more advanced than anything yet seen on Earth. Then, of course, there are the theories that humans are actually descended from ancient refugees from a dying Mars. 

This is one book readers can judge by its cover. The Big Book of Mars sports a gorgeously painted, vintage pulp-inspired cover. A lone astronaut stands astride the cratered surface of the red planet as comets and stars shine in the background. The book hints at adventure, danger, and mysteries not yet imagined, let alone confronted, by Earth-bound humans. Especially in a year when I have hardly left my apartment, the promise of adventure and the unknown is particularly powerful.

Hartzman’s The Big Book of Mars is a wildly entertaining and comprehensive look at Earth’s obsession with its planetary neighbor. This book is recommended for NASA nerds, sci-fi devotees, and anyone feeling a little too cooped up at the moment.

* But wait, there’s more! Gustav Holtz’ “Mars,” Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars, the centaurs won’t shut up about Mars when Harry Potter first meets them in The Sorcerer’s Stone, everyone emigrates to Mars in Blade Runner, Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time Slip, Doctor Manhattan moves to Mars after getting some bad news in Watchmen — I had never stopped to think about it, but Mars is almost omnipresent in pop culture.

Forgetting that stretch of time when Twilight and True Blood were in their heyday and vampire-themed anything sold faster than blood punch at a monster mash, there can be no better time to release a vampire novel than during a pandemic.

Vampires, in lore, have deep roots in plague. It’s no surprise that garlic, which boosts the immune system and can help cover the smell of sickness, wards off night-walking, bloodsucking fiends. And that whole blood thing, well, bodily fluids are certainly a vector for spreading disease. Which brings us to vampires’ oft-documented predilection for uninhibited sex with multiple partners, yet another way to spread disease.

So, after a manner of speaking, Grady Hendrix’s The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires (Quirk Books) could hardly be better timed. Though, maybe the New York-based, South Carolina-born author would have preferred his novel to come out at a time when book clubs could actually meet.

• Grady Hendrix

Every vampire novel worth its holy water must pay homage to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the brilliant epistolary novel that condensed the span of bloodsucker folklore into one tome. Hendrix’s The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires does just that, while simultaneously making a case for itself as something notable in the horror genre.

Set in a nice neighborhood in a South Carolina suburb in the ’90s, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires isn’t a typical tale of Transylvanian terror. Hendrix’s protagonist is Patricia Campbell, a youngish housewife whose hardworking psychiatrist husband is logging extra hours at work in an attempt to climb the ladder. Her kids are beginning to enter difficult ages, and her mother-in-law lives with them. Her care falls mainly to Patricia, at least until Patricia hires a part-time caretaker, Mrs. Greene. Patricia’s world is focused largely on her family and her community. She’s got a mile-long to-do list and very little in the way of diversion. Except her book club.

They meet once a month to discuss grisly paperback true crime accounts. It’s a rare source of excitement for Patricia, who carries her family and is, for the most part, taken for granted by them. Then James Harris moves to town, and everything gets really interesting, really quickly.

• Grady Hendrix

Hendrix’s new novel underlines the disenfranchised in society by giving them first contact with the Old Village’s vampire — and then making sure no one with any power believes their warnings. James Harris takes his victims primarily from the low-income, majority-African-American part of town, and every year, when a young black child disappears, it’s chalked up to parental neglect or drugs and then shrugged off by most of the town’s blissfully ignorant inhabitants. 

Hendrix, author of My Best Friend’s Exorcism and Horrorstör, has a firm grasp on — and he deftly exploits — the narrow band of believable reality that most adults inhabit. When Miss Mary “mistakes” James Harris for Hoyte Pickens, it’s attributed to a lapse in an old woman’s memory. Similarly, the kids couldn’t have seen a man on the roof; they imagined it, spurred on by the wind, nightmares, a copy of Salem’s Lot open on the nightstand.

The best example of this, though, is the book club itself. When Patricia and her fellow members, housewives all, suggest that there may be something strange about the stranger in town, their concerns are waved off as the imaginings of flighty women, the result of a mixture of boredom and the lurid books they read. There is some genius in Hendrix’s setting in this. The novel takes place between the women’s lib movement and #MeToo, between the civil rights struggle and the era of Black Lives Matter. And so much inequality in the novel is glossed over by a combination of manners, mind-your-business mentality, and a studied refusal to acknowledge obvious problems. Most of the people in the novel believe that inequality has been erased; they know society works for everyone because it works for them. It’s an excellent setup for a horror novel, where the ability to see past the status quo can mean the difference between life and death.

But Patricia is a little unconventional. She’s as guilty as the next Old Villager of taking her privileges for granted, but she’s willing to challenge herself and she’s got heart. “A woman had died. She needed to take something by the house. Grace was right: it made no sense, but sometimes you did a thing because that was just what you did, not because it was sensible.”

Kim Vodicka is a poet with a penchant for the provocative, but even she won’t risk tangling with the novel coronavirus COVID-19. Though she was gearing up for a busy spring to promote her new poetry collection, The Elvis Machine (Clash Books), Vodicka read the signs correctly and changed her plans.

Vodicka, author of 2018’s Psychic Privates, was one of the first of a slew of Memphis writers, artists, and musicians to change travel and promotion plans when she canceled a stop at an Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference in San Antonio, Texas. The conference was held on March 4th-7th, and though some events were canceled, it went ahead as planned — just before concern over the coronavirus meant a slew of cancelations, closures, and postponements across the country.

• Kim McCarthy
• Kim Vodicka

“I was aware of news about the virus even though it really hadn’t hit most of North America yet,” she says. “But by no means did I understand the gravity of it. The Monday before we were supposed to leave, AWP had an emergency meeting about plans.” Vodicka says the announcement of an emergency meeting kicked off “an entire day’s worth of tremendous confusion."

“At that point, to my surprise, a lot of people were saying to go ahead and go but just take precautions,” Vodicka says. “It wasn’t sitting well with me so I decided not to go.”

The next week, coronavirus got very real for people, as schools began closing or extending their spring breaks, and businesses were forced to adapt in real-time.

“I was scheduled to go to the New Orleans Poetry Festival to be on a panel,” Vodicka says, adding that she had been looking forward to participating in the panel discussion about witchcraft in poetry. Vodicka says that while she does not practice traditional magic per se, the act of creation and all art-making have roots in magic. She is also scheduled to attend the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which has been postponed in light of the global pandemic.

“Fortunately I had not planned a full-on tour,” the writer muses. “I do have some events scheduled for May and June that have not been canceled yet, but we shall see.”

Vodicka’s tours are part poetry reading and part performance art, where she is often accompanied by a musician live-composing music to her readings. For a poetry reading, they are never short on spectacle — exactly what one would expect from a poet who sums up her work by saying, “The lines are zingers, and truth bombs are atomic.”

• Book cover art and design by Joel Amat Güell
• The Elvis Machine

“All of Memphis is a Heartbreak Hotel,” Vodicka says to describe The Elvis Machine, which she started writing shortly after moving to Memphis from Louisiana in 2016. She finished the collection in 2018, and it was submitted for publication in 2019.

“The official release date is July 7th, but the preorders ship in May,” Vodicka says, adding that pre-publication events, especially in the small press world, are of vital importance for a book’s success. Still, even though The Elvis Machine has been four years in the making and Vodicka is working to adapt to a coronavirus-shaped wrench in the works, she isn’t exactly checking into the Heartbreak Hotel over delays caused by pandemic panic. “I haven’t been moping about this or trying to make this all about me because I’m more concerned about humanity and society crumbling.” She promises that, though the collection promises not to skirt past the dirty or grisly aspects of relationships, “no names are named.”

On March 10th, with the publication of That We May Live: Speculative Works of Chinese Fiction, Two Lines Press will debut the Calico Series, artfully reproduced collections of translated works of literature. The inaugural collection gathers seven short works of speculative Chinese fiction. Plastic surgery, surveillance, intoxicating fermented “tea,” and buildings that shuffle themselves around on their own accord fill the pages of the debut.

The collection begins, in Dorothy Tse’s “Sour Meat,” with a speeding train, squealing metal on metal, and a woman identified only as F starting awake, immediately establishing several of That We May Live’s motifs — the juxtaposition of human-made with natural phenomena, and the permeable barrier between the absurd or dreamlike and reality. Tse’s “Sour Meat,” translated by Natascha Bruce, reads like a fever dream of a fairy tale. That danger lurks in F’s future is certain, but the rules for how to skirt it are less clear. Why should a young woman’s trip to visit her grandmother be so fraught and frightening? What secret inner life is awakened at the taste of the grandmother’s fermented “tea”? And who are the strange sorority of women obsessed with — addicted to? — the mysterious beverage? The 26-page story deftly juggles dreamlike passages with hints of generational trauma, giving just the barest hints, wafting like steam from potent tea.

• Courtesy Two Lines Press
• Dorothy Tse

Enoch Tam’s work is represented twice, and his first offering, “Auntie Han’s Modern Life,” deals with issues of urbanization, displacement, and the uneven symbiosis between modern/urban and traditional/rural areas. “Auntie Han knew the houses had been in low spirits for a while,” Tam writes. “Some were even depressed enough that they stopped moving altogether. The others did everything they could to remind their moribund companions of all the times they’d worked together to thwart the humans and how satisfying it had felt to be constantly mobile. But the sad, silent houses remained sad and silent.”

That the stories in That We May Live resonate with the gravity of fairy tales and mythology is a credit to all parties involved — the writers, translators, and editors all did excellent work. Every short story should strive for high stakes and economical, poetic use of language, but not every short story collection hits that mark with the consistency and accuracy of the selections represented here. Each offering adds a layer, deepening the resonance of the themes explored in the collection.

• Courtesy Two Lines Press
• Natascha Bruce

“After the elephant vanished, my life fell into chaos,” writes Hong Kong-born Chan Chi Wa, translated by Audrey Heijins, in “The Elephant.” In a sentence that could be applied to any story in the collection, Wa continues, “I wondered if I was hallucinating — the scene in front of me must have been an illusion, a misconception, a mirage in broad daylight.” A mirage in broad daylight, indeed, is often what the reader is left contemplating. But these mirages tempt the reader onward — searching for meaning or just another beautiful, dangerous, dreamlike image.

• Courtesy Two Lines Press
• Enoch Tam