JD Scott’s Moonflower, Nightshade, All the Hours of the Day is a dazzling collection of stories—part dystopian, part fabulist, and wholly immersive ... Sharp, compelling language leads to immersion in Joshua’s disorienting world of shape-shifters and shadows, which challenges expectations ... Like stepping through a looking glass, the stories of Moonflower, Nightshade, All Hours of the Day skirt the edges of reality and shimmer with enchanting, otherworldly light.
JD Scott’s new collection Moonflower, Nightshade, All the Hours of the Day is a surreal and poetically-written foray into the familiar and the weird. It’s the kind of book that can make the quotidian seem fantastical and can evoke the banality of living in a world that might look wondrous on paper. This is a book that abounds with unlikely miracles and strange damnations; even so, Scott’s fiction is also about such resonant themes as ritual, grief, and the unknown ... The collection takes on a delirious, dreamlike quality—magnified by the presence of rituals in many of these stories—which adds to the sense that anything could happen, including forays into the miraculous ... Neatly summarizing it isn’t easy, but experiencing it is rewarding indeed.
Published as part of the 'Plonsker Series' after winning the Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writers Prize, this hard-to-categorize collection by JD Scott is a literate, genre-bending blend of fairy tale and fantasy. When the mixture works (occasionally it doesn’t), it seems effortless and magical ... surprising and exhilarating. Scott’s prose is both adept and poetic: a woman’s eyes are 'oceancold'; a drunk shouts in 'vodka glossolalia.' In the sly, coming-of-age novella that ends the collection, the entire world has become a mall, while the narrator tries to ignore the numerous magical and literal archetypes that keep attempting to lure him away from his job. Writes the author: 'Surely that can’t be real, but I’ve heard about magic, how it could destroy our stores, just like that, if you let it in.'
