... 20 stylish and psychologically tense stories ... leading the reader into realms full of dread and suspense, weirdness and wonder, paranoia and pain ... Although ghosts occasionally populate her tales, Jemc is less M.R. James and more Robert Aickman. Rarely relying on obvious chills or violence, her stories — as surreal as they are scary — dwell magnificently in the realm of the upsetting yet pleasingly confounding. Ultimately, it’s the details of reality — the things that can and do happen all the time — that make the stories shine, for Jemc knows how to use mundanity to throw the truly bizarre into sharp relief ... Jemc’s erudite, offbeat sense of humor contributes brilliantly to the collection’s pervasive unease as often as does anything overtly supernatural ... A highly literary writer who takes delight in the smallest elements of language, Jemc masterfully uses personification in apt but jittery ways ... Twenty stories might sound like a lot, but the book flies by, because Jemc knows how to deploy both brevity and irresolution. Story after story exhibits the understanding that it’s usually creepier to wonder than to know. Yet she never makes the reader feel like she’s simply messing around or doesn’t know what’s going on herself ... Jemc feels like the friend you listen to with nervous anticipation.

In her second story collection, False Bingo, Jac Jemc delivers 20 compact, disquieting stories that are starkly realistic yet tinged with a sense of otherworldly menace ... Jemc's ability to build an undercurrent of threat in mundane situations is reminiscent of Shirley Jackson ... In all her writing, Jemc displays dexterity with characters and precision with words and sentences, creating small worlds that satisfy even as they disturb. Fans of Daisy Johnson and Helen Oyeyemi will relish these stories of mistrust, danger and regrets.

Jemc returns with 20 electrifying short stories, some no longer than a few pages, but every one odd and memorable for wildly different reasons ... Jemc populates her stories with characters who may seem familiar, but whose actions often veer feverishly off-script ... A writer compared to Shirley Jackson and Henry James, Jemc continues to solidify her standing as a talented writer of the uncanny, the horrifying, and the hilarious.

Though most originally appeared in other publications, these 20 brief tales conduct a smoothly coordinated investigation of the human tendency toward blind spots and bad assumptions ... An occasional narrative twist feels overly neat, creating a structure too airtight to support much life. But more often, [Jemc] turns her utter command of her materials toward wild and stirring ends ... She plants several little utopias within the pages of False Bingo, sowing metafictional mischief with curiously untroubled plots and characters ... In these stories, the dread that hums beneath the rest of False Bingo is replaced by a whisper of melancholy. Perhaps it is, on balance, right to expect disaster, but what do we sacrifice by always compelling our attention toward the shadows? What chances might we be missing—even now—to unhex ourselves, and set our fates on a new and better course?

Jemc is a gifted writer of a certain kind of literary suspense. The stories in False Bingo are wound tight, propelling the reader to ambiguous and nerve-wracking ends ... There's a lot of Shirley Jackson in these stories ... Jemc's characters, often female, testify to a very specific embodied experience of being a woman in certain spaces.

Jemc’s electric, nimble collection...plumbs its characters’ most intimate relationships and unearths potent hidden truths ... Many of these stories are only a few pages, allowing Jemc to deliver a range of payoffs, some unsettling, some poignant, all evocative. This constantly shifting collection will leave readers beguiled.

Jemc’s...stories revel in disquiet. Sometimes this uneasiness is the palpable result of external forces...Sometimes they expand into gleeful expressions of the macabre ... Jemc’s insistence on her stories’ rights not to resolve their dilemmas is the thread that binds this book together, though too many similarly disaffected characters make the stories difficult to digest back to back. The result is a collection that will disappoint a reader looking for a tightly controlled narrative arc but delight one willing to learn how these particular stories want to be read. Tense, well-imagined stories whose tendencies to unravel mirror the characters they chronicle.