False Bingo: Stories — Jac Jemc

The mundane becomes sinister in this collection of twenty disquieting stories from the author of The Grip of It.

In Jac Jemc's dislocating second story collection, False Bingo, we watch as sinister forces -- some supernatural, some of this earth, some real and some not -- work their ways into the mundanity of everyday life.

“Strange Loop” introduces us to an outcast who, attempting to escape an unnamed mistake, spends his days taxiderming animals. In “Delivery,” a family watches as their dementia-addled, basement-dwelling father succumbs to an online shopping addiction. “Don't Let's” finds a woman, recently freed from an abusive relationship, living in an isolated vacation home in the South that might be haunted by breath-stealing ghosts.

Fueled by paranoia and visceral suspense, and crafted with masterful restraint, these twenty stories explore what happens when our fears become real, if only for a moment. Identities are stolen, alternate universes are revealed, and innocence is lost as the consequences of minor, seemingly harmless decisions erupt to sabotage a false sense of stability. “This is not a morality tale about the goodness of one character triumphing over the bad of another,” the shrewd narrator of “Pastoral” announces. Rather, False Bingo is a collection of realist fables exploring how conflicting moralities can coexist: the good, the bad, the indecipherable.

Praise for False Bingo

Named a Fall Read by The Boston Globe and the Chicago Tribune

“Combines the otherworldliness of Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation, the menacing irony of Shirley Jackson and the cold feminist fury of Margaret Atwood. . . . There's no denying that Jemc has a gift for making you want to keep reading.” -- The New York Times Book Review

“Biting and darkly funny, sometimes quirky, sometimes disturbing, but always revealing, the stories in False Bingo slice with measured precision to the heart of what's human and accomplish this so deftly as to leave the patient still alive.” -- Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World