BOOK REVIEW: The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories by Mahvesh Murad and Jared Shurin ★★★★☆

A fascinating collection of new and classic tales of the fearsome Djinn, from bestselling, award-winning and breakthrough international writers.

Imagine a world filled with fierce, fiery beings, hiding in our shadows, in our dreams, under our skins. Eavesdropping and exploring; savaging our bodies, saving our souls. They are monsters, saviours, victims, childhood friends.

Some have called them genies: these are the Djinn. And they are everywhere. On street corners, behind the wheel of a taxi, in the chorus, between the pages of books. Every language has a word for them. Every culture knows their traditions. Every religion, every history has them hiding in their dark places. There is no part of the world that does not know them.

They are the Djinn. They are among us. 

Nominated for three literary awards, The Djinn Falls in Love (And Other Stories) is a wonderful collection of the many variations of the djinn. You may find them religious or deviant, mischievous or kind, good or evil, and everything in between. They appear in the Quran, and many of them are known by different names, in many cultures across the globe.

It was widely acknowledged that Mars was infested with jinn. Allah might have made the red planet specifically for them; they loved its dust, its volcanic landscape and boundless plains.

I must admit, I love the book cover. Simple with neutral navy blue and white smoke. It wasn’t stereotypical with a magic lamp and a blue humanoid shape courtesy of Disney’s Aladdin and other oriental interpretations. This anthology shows such diversity, accessibility, and variation. No matter your reading taste, anyone will find stories they like in this collection, regardless if someone is unfamiliar with culture and religion.

I’m glad the editors, Mahvesh Murad and Jared Shurin changed the original title Djinnthology. Their goal was to showcase a global storytelling about the djinn with a title worthy of the work. Taken from the first entry, the title of the poem, translated from Arabic by Robin Morger, The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories does exactly that. This collection doesn’t show djinns as monster, but as everyday people, maybe as lovers or our other halves of ourselves that reflect our sins and virtues.

I will review each story and give a 5-star rating to my favourites.

Djinn, jinn or genie, every culture has their own interpretation.

The Djinn Falls in Love by Hermes (trans. Robin Moger)
Rating: 3/5
I’m no poet, but there’s something about this poem that was probably lost in translation. It set the tone for the rest of the stories but felt disjointed and didn’t make much sense when reading it a few times. I’m going to take a wild guess and say it’s about a djinn falling in love but is possessed or struggles with it? I don’t know. It was a good starting piece to get you into the anthology. Can’t say more about it.
Hermes is the pen name of Mohamed Magdy, a Cairo-based, Egyptian poet, writer and translator with works included three poetry collection, Chirping in Braille, My Beloved Kalashnikovs, and Evasions.

The Congregation by Kamila Shamsie
Rating: 4/5
Without giving too must away, it’s about a young man named Qasim, who goes for fajr (dawn) pray at the mosque and finds a djinn worshipping inside.
The world of humanity and djinn is as thin as a veil and that veil can be pierced. An interesting mix between Islamic culture, human behaviour and possession. The story is a good start to the collection about djinns folklore steeped in tradition. Humans were made from clay and djinns made from smokeless fire. A tale of twin brothers separated by nature and joined by love. Shamsie created a story about a man’s yearning to find his other half. I found a new author and a wish to have this made into a full novel.
Kamila Shamsie is the author od six novels, including critically acclaimed Burnt Shadows. Three of her novels have received awards from the Pakistan Academy of Letters.

How We Remember You by Kuzhail Manickavel
Rating: 3/5
Initially I was confused. I think it’s about three friends who did something to a djinn. As I read it again, it’s about a human who are the real monsters and the djinn who paid the price. Set in the second person and with flashbacks, it evokes a sense of timelessness, nostalgia and regret during a turbulent adolescence times, the cruelty we bestow on the ones we love, know too well, and envy. This wasn’t my favourite as I wasn’t really in the mood to read it.
Kuzhail Manicjavel’s collection Eating Sugar, Telling Lies are available from Blaft Publications as e-chapbook. His works have appeared in Granta, Agni, Subtropics, Michigan Quarterly Review and DIAGRAM.

Hurrem and the Djinn by Claire North
Rating: 4/5 This one was interesting. Three men in the Sultan’s court are convinced that the Sultan’s favourite mistress Hurrem is controlling the ruler through a powerful djinn. They call upon their own djinn to investigate, with somewhat unexpected results.
Set in a gossip like conversational tone, we learn that men are stupid and women set in a patriarchal society know how to gain power. While the story idea was interesting, the execution left something to be desired as I think it could have been more fleshed out.
It has a good but predictable twist and an author I will look into.
Claire North is a pseudonym for Kate Griffin, who is actually Catherine Webb. She’s a London based writer of many fantasty and science fiction writer including Touch, and The End of The Day.

Glass Lights by J Y Yang
Rating: 5/5 Mena finds out her grandmother was a djinn. She struggles in the contemporary world with loneliness, gender and race discrimination as she likes a guy at her work but she knows she’s not perfect enough for him.
Despite the lack of plot, on the surface, I liked this one. Mena spends her time in wish-granting and self-pity, constantly comparing her blandness self to others beauty and in turn making the lives of the people around her better while resenting them their happiness. Glass Lights has a brilliant poignant and bittersweet idea., great writing with an insipid protagonist that needs to get her shit together.
J.Y. Yang’s Tensorate novella include The Black Tides of Heaven and The Red Thread of Fortunes.

Authenticity by Monica Byrne
Rating: 1/5 A young woman searches for authentic experiences, and sex just happens to be that one experience. She gets involved with a young man who is filming a porn movie. One of them is a djinn.
I really did not like this one. This is basically porn that was trying too hard to do something creative and failed. I did not care about it.
Monica Byrne is a playwright, traveller, artist and activist who is the author of the Tiptree Award winning debut novel The Girl in The Road.

Majnun by Helene Wecker
Rating: 5/5 

Zahid is a djinn who found Islam and is now an exorcist who drives out djinns possessing humans. His next case involves a possessed innocent boy. Zahid discovers that it isn’t a random djinn, but his formal lover Aisha, a beautiful djinn ruler who tries to coax him back to his old life.
I loved this one. Wecker did a great job at revealing Zahid’s true identity and his inner turmoil in reverting back to his former life. She created strong characters, full of convictions who give in or resisted temptation that leave the human characters, and often the djinn, deeply changed.
Helene Wecker novel The Golem and The Djinni won the Mythopoeic award the Ribalow Prize and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Its sequel The Iron Season is out in 2018. 

Black Powder by Maria Dahvana Headley
Rating: 3/5
A hunter, a kid, a pawnshop owner, and a priest become entwined in a story about a djinn that lives in a rifle. This one had everything. Tediously long, alternating present/past events, different storylines of the Wild West gold rush, genies and Tales of 1001 Arabian Nights. Loved the idea, but it was mindboggling complex, filled with purple prose and obscure descriptions.
Maria Dahvana Headley has been a finalist for the Nebula and Shirley Jackson awards and has worked with nail Gaiman and Kat Howard. Her own novels include Queen of Kings, Magonia and Aerie. 

A Tale of Ash in Seven Birds by Amal El-Mohtar
Rating: 4/5
At first I wasn’t sure about this one. It’s just one of those prose-poem you either love or hate. Magicians hunt reincarnations of birds. This tale is a sweeping view of the relationship of the rise and fall, and appropriation of civilization between man and djinn. It’s an epic tale all from the djinn’s perspective, portraying humans as the other dark entity that lurk in the dark spaces. Also, it symbolises the characterisation of the smokeless fire spirits; you begin a sparrow, and journey through various birds until you rise as a phoenix. Under the surface it is a beautiful prose poem or lyric story: The seven birds include in this order: sparrow, crow, cormorant, swallow, hummingbird, great horned owl and phoenix.
Amal El-Mohtar is an author, editor and critic, finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy Award and her fiction has appeared in anthologies such as Starlight Woods: New Fairy Tales, magazines such as Lightspeed and online poet quarterly Goblin Fruit.

The Sand in the Glass is Right by James Smythe
Rating: 4/5
A man who finds the magic lamp and tries to outsmart the trickster genie inside, as he tries time and time again to get his wish right, but what does he lose in the process?
This doesn’t get a full five star because it was awfully opaque with its constantly shifting POVs and timeframes. But it was a good read, and I admire the theme of consequences and the different scenarios, moral issues and the afterlife. I liked this one and would probably be best on a second read.
James Smythe is the author of award winning The Machine, No Harm Can Come to A Good Man, the Anomaly Quartet and Authorial Trilogy.

Reap by Sami Shah
Rating: 5/5
During a long-distance drone surveillance of a potential terrorist group on the Pak-Afghan border, a US military unit witnesses something completely unexpected and horrific.
A brash beginning becoming a powerful, unexpectedly moving tale, this was my surprising favourite. Shah takes the horror and anonymity of drone warfare and ties it up with the power of the djinn. Full five stars for the following reasons. The writing is excellent, plot builds momentum, sets a creepy horrific tone of a djinn possessing a girl who comes back to take revenge from her assailant. It’s a brilliant story that will stay with me for a while.
Sami Shah is a Pakistani comedian and writers with a memoir I, Migrant and his debut novel Fire Boy, a bold, compelling fantasy about a half-djinn boy living in Karachi.

Queen of Sheba by Catherine Faris King
Rating: 3/5
Twelve-year-old Juanita celebrates her first Christmas with the adults, but as she's ironing a tablecloth, she sees visions or memories that don’t belong to her.
This was a good idea, although utterly bizarre, but I think I’m only saying this because I’m still buzzing from the last story. It’s a good story but not something I’d remember.
Catherine Faris King is a Lebanese Irish American writer who enjoys ‘blogging, cooking and globetrotting. Her debut The Ninety-Ninth Bride is published by The Book Smugglers on Amazon.

The Jinn Hunter’s Apprentice by E J Swift
Rating: 5/5 A spaceship set for Ganymede, Mars is highjacked by djinns, and a jinn hunter's apprentice comes to investigate and solve the matter.
This is a close second of my favourites and here’s why. Swift created a seamless mix of sci-fi, horror and fantasy mythology of the djinn into a well-crafted story, with an interesting concept of humanity and culture. In this classic space adventure, you don’t know the apprentice Fahima’s and Captain Bukhari’s intention and you keep guessing till the end. I’ll be sure to look into this author’s future work.
E J Swift is the author of The Osiris Project Trilogy, with short fiction appearing in Strata and The Best British Fantasy. She was shortlisted for the 2013 BSFA Award in the Short Fiction category for her story Saga’s Children and was longlisted for the 2015 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award for The Spiders of Stockholm.

Message in a Bottle by K J Parker
Rating: 4/5
During the Middle Ages, a scholar is chosen to determine the future of humanity during an epidemic and he basis this on Antigono Scaevola, a previous deceased scholar's bottle labelled "For the plague" is a cure, or a new strain that will wipe out humanity. Opening the bottle becomes literally a matter of life and death for his whole civilization.
This was a pretty good story. Parker keeps you guessing. Wad Scaevola a genius or evil? Is the bottle absolute salvation or total destruction of mankind? How could the young scholar decide when both options seem equally viable? The world building seems timeless, with a predictable good twist and Parker writing is good, but my only criticism would be this; couldn't he test it on people in confinement? Just a thought. I’d probably read the whole book if it was such a thing.
Message in a Bottle, is set in the same world as his fantasy series The Fencer Trilogy by his pseudonym name, Tom Holt. He’s won the world fantasy award for novellas in 2013 and 2014. I’ll be sure to check out his work

Bring Your Own Spoon by Saad Z Hossain
Rating: 5/5
In a post apocalypse where food is scarce, Huna (a human) decides to start a restaurant with the help of Imbi, (a djinn) but the authorities aren’t impressed.
It’s set in a post-apocalyptic dystopian reality, but this short story left me thinking about current segregation, the rich oppressing the poor and the importance of community. The world building is imaginative and believable, like a pot for many tangential plot lines. I like how Huna cooks while Imbi collects scraps of food to cook, as they build their restaurant in the slums. It shows a new side of the djinn, not granting wishes, but appearing more human than even some humans. I would honestly read this story if it was available as a novel.
Born is Dhaka, Bangladesh, Saad Hossian’s novel Escape from Baghdad! was included in the Finical Times Best Books of 2015 and The Tor Reviewers List 2015. His next novel Djinn City is available now.

Somewhere in America by Neil Gaiman
Rating: 3/5
Salim is sent to America to sell his brother-in-law’s cheap nic-nacs, and finds an unexpected friend in a cab driver.
This entry is an extract from Gaiman’s novel American Gods. The writing is great, with excellent characterization but I wasn’t a fan of this book. I read American Gods last year and it was so tediously long, but this chapter in that book works really well on its own. I liked Salim’s transformation that was made possible through contact with the djinn, how he unconsciously wished for a new life gives a wholly satisfying conclusion. I don’t like reading about sex, oral sex to be really precise, so this only gets a three-star rating.
Neil Gaiman is the author of over thirty acclaimed books and graphic novels for adults and children such as Stardust, Coraline, The Sandman, Neverwhere and American Gods. He’s collaborated with authors and illustrators including Terry Pratchett, Dave McKean and Chris Riddell.

Duende 2077 by Jamal Mahjoub
Rating: 3/5
Set in a dystopian ‘cyberpunk’ future, where the capitalism in the west died and an Islamic Rashidun Caliphate rules the power vacuum, Dhaka investigates a rare murder. There are whispers of a messiah and a spirit or djinn.
Mahjoub’s 2017 paints a bleak picture of a fractured theocracy, technological isolation and social destruction. I liked how the djinn is not a psychical being, but an abstract who’s name itself evokes a rebellion hidden in dark places. This had an interesting concept (murder mystery in a sci-fi setting, with supernatural elements) and an okay execution, but it was a little too cryptic. Who was the murderer?
As a student, Jamal Mahjoub began publishing his literary texts in magazines. his stories are a mix of history, science and superstition. His latest book Dark Water from the Makana crime fiction series is written under the pseudonym Parker Bilal.

The Righteous Guide of Arabsat by Sophia Al-Maria
Rating: 4/5
In the contemporary Middle East, Khalid, a sexually repressed man, marries what his mother claims to be a 'good girl.' But after discovering his new wife Aneeza knows more about sex than he does, he’s utterly convinced she must be possessed by a djinn.
A chillingly disturbing story with a combination of humour; this has a Victorian attitude toward sex kind of vibe. People back then thought a woman who knows more about the art of sex compared to a man is either a whore or is possessed by the supernatural. Middle eastern and Islamic culture shows how promiscuity is disguised as supernatural possession. Khalid would rather believe that his wife is possessed than admit that she may have had more sexual partners before him. The ending was chilling, almost laughable about the ignorance of sex education, mirrored by a TV scholar ‘agony aunting’ Khalid’s mother and how a man’s fear of female sexuality can become a danger to women. I liked this one, because Al-Maria crafted a realistic piece of fiction that can happen in modern society.
Sophia Al-Maria lives in London and writes for film and TV. Her first book, The Girl Who Fell to Earth came out in 2012. She is credited with coining the term ‘Gulf Futurism’. You can find her on her blog https://sophiaalmaria.wordpress.com/

The Spite House by Kirsty Logan
Rating: 5/5 

Is the ability to fulfil wishes a gift or a curse? Esha, a half djinn/half human woman takes the leftover junk people leave in their yards, but when a Lexy confronts her about this and makes a wish, she feels a power overtake her. But is she the one with the power? the one wishing is an evil person, looking for revenge.
Oh, this one was good! An unexpected favourite, loved the switch in power dynamics that gives a bitter, selfish woman the upper hand over the half-believing djinn. The spite house is built not for comfort or residents, but in order to grab land or needlessly take up space. This falls on the djinn race who have now become worldly and forced to live in such places. The ending makes you question who is actually living in such a house and who’s in charge. Interesting plot, intensely relatable characters who have their burdens, I’d be willing to read a whole book based on the premise. Logan’s writing style was great in the way the characters show their true colours.
Kirsty Logan is the author of two novels, The Gloaming and The Gracekeepers, with a Portable Shelter and The Rental Heart & Other Fairytales story collection Her fifth book, Things We Say in the Dark, will be published on Halloween 2019.

Emperors of Jinn by Usman T Malik
Rating: 3/5
A story about possession, ownership and power, a group of bored, rich, bratty children become obsessed with a spell book that conjures djinn.
Honestly, these evil brats (especially Zak) got what was coming to them. Despite the okay writing and idea, I felt as though it missed something because the flow was incomprehensible at times. But if Malik builds on the premise, I’d be sure to read it.
Usman T Malik is a Pakistani writer of strange stories that won him the Bram Stoker, a British Fantasy Award and a finalist for the Nebula and the World Fantasy Award.

History by Nnedi Okorafor
Rating: 3/5 History is a superstar singer, who prepares for a televised concert. She enthrals both humans and magical creatures with her art, reflects on a childhood spent in Africa, and the magic she learned there, and the bush baby she caught that lives in her mirror.
This was unnecessarily intricate. It is interesting enough, mystical but with too many magical creatures for a short story. Unless it’s an extract for a novel.
Nnedi Okorafor is a Nigerian American author of African-based science fiction, fantasy and magical realism for both children and adults, with woks include, Who Fears Death, the Binti novella trilogy, etc. she’s won the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards. Her debut novel Zahrah the Windseeker won the prestigious Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature. You can find her on her blog http://nnedi.blogspot.com

Summary

We have wish-granters and shape-changers, immortals and spirits, hoarders and hermits.

What makes a great anthology is the diversity of the authors, their ideas and their writing style. Murad and Shurin gave an excellent rage of Arabian Nights parodies to the contemporary djinn, east to west, future dystopias, sci fi and history, a huge diversity of women writers, queer and heterosexual characters with lyrical-mystical prose to violent, romantic, horror. This absolute cracker of an anthology has everything. There's not a single poorly written piece in this collection, albeit one or two I didn’t like because of the subject matter. Thanks to this collection, I will be checking out some of the authors that were new to me to see what else they've written.
I would definitely recommend this to anyone who loves short stories with a diverse collection and a touch of magic. Personally, I wouldn’t read this collection back to back as the stories ideas about djinns all merge into one. Overall, I enjoyed this collection very much and I would recommend it to fantasy and magic literature lovers.

Overall Rating: 4/5
Publishers: Rebellion Publishing
Publication date: March 9th 2017
Genre: Fantasy/ Short Stories/Anthology