Receive a foil tarot card with your pre-order of the limited edition.
A drunk priest in a famine-struck city is press-ganged into vampire hunting by a monster who calls himself Christ's Blackguard. A schoolgirl asks a séance jar whether there is a witch among them, and something answers. A condemned woman meets her executioner in a river and finds he is concealing more than she is. Behind an electric fence in Johannesburg, a woman stops washing, grows claws, and tells her dogs that tomorrow they will be wolves.
Eight stories. Eight cards. Eight ways to be remade.
From the gallows at Salem to a Cape Town lifestyle estate, from the ocean of milk where a god's white elephant waits to a factory in hell run by Brer Rabbit, Major Arcana turns the deck face-up on the oldest business of the tarot: the moment a life stops being one thing and becomes another. Here are the accused, the appetite-ridden, the erased and the unforgiven – each one meeting the self the card has been holding all along.
Including stories by: Andrea Le Riche, Brett Rex Bruton, Gary Hartley, Luke Wildman, Nerine Dorman, Peter-Adrian Altini, Rhett Sinnema and Sitara Hooseria.
If you love dark fiction with arresting characters and a story that bites, you’ll love what the Major Arcana anthology has within its pages. Using the archetypes of the tarot to craft stories that explore marginalisation, bodily autonomy, and spiritual rebellion, this collection features eight stories from different voices and writers that somehow manage to speak with each other in how these themes are tackled. From Gary Hartley’s Site-Specific Work taking us on a vengeful haunting that tugs at your heartstrings and emotions, to Rhett Sinema’s DAMNED and Andrea le Riche’s XIII - DEATH giving us flawed and downtrodden characters to rally behind, these stories become a manifesto on fighting to reclaim one’s truth, position and identity.
Like the book’s blurb suggests: Eight stories. Eight cards. Eight ways to be remade. Mirari Press provides the reader with a body of work in which the tarot cards come alive and act as ghostly figures in these characters’ lives and how they move. I appreciated how some stories gave me the opportunity to speculate about which card was in play and how it would factor in the story, despite the very reality that I could be wrong. The tarot is, after all, about intuition. While one person can be sure that they’re under the Tower, another can clearly see the nuances of a Death card or Swords suit. We come up with different interpretations despite the cards being the same, but there is always one underlying message. The Major Arcana anthology invites the reader to the table with these stories, to kind of read backwards and dissect meaning to get the card.
The collection may be a quick read you can finish in one sitting, but best believe that it has everything for everyone looking to get lost in gripping and gory fantasy stories. From mythic fantasy, dark academia, spirits, trickster gods and omens, and bodies as sites of change and retributions, you will find something to love and people to root for. Or not? Whether through blood sacrifice or wearing the skin of a dead dog to partake in a little haunting or forbidden magic in a strict academy, each story insists that when systems police the body, reclaiming identity is the ultimate act of power. Among the eight, the few that stood out for me were Andrea le Riche’s DEATH, Sitara Hooseria’s The Ocean of Milk, and Luke Wildman’s Seanna O’Gab and Brer Rabbit. They were all amazing!