THE PHONE

This genre-spanning anthology explores grief using antiquated telephone technology.

If you could call up the dead, what would you say? This book’s title references Itaru Sasaki’s wind phone, a conceptual sculpture that allows people to hold one-way conversations with the dead via an unconnected telephone booth. Versions of “the Phone” crop up in each of these stories, often appearing literally out of thin air: on a beach outside of a school for magic; in the corner of a supernatural customer service representative’s bedroom; in the middle of a Kyoto, Japan, railway station. The Phone is accompanied by a plaque with the inscription “For What Is Left Unsaid.” A woman, uncertain of how to raise an adoptee alone, uses the Phone to try to call his dead father, knowing he can't say anything back. A group of kids in Louisiana breaks into a local, abandoned house only to have the Phone follow them mysteriously from room to room. Two Martian colonists return to a mostly deserted Earth looking for male genetic material and encounter the Phone amid the rubble of civilization. These 28 stories by 20 authors crisscross genres, from satirical retellings of Greek myths to realistic, present-day stories and speculative works set on alien worlds. A few contributors are emerging authors, and there are some prolific writers of horror and fantasy represented, including Jonas Saul and Russell Nohelty. While a few of the tales are disappointingly straightforward, the anthology—edited by Komp—is admirably cohesive as a whole. The pieces are generally short, allowing readers to leap from premise to premise and genre to genre in the space of a few pages. With each appearance of the Phone, the object’s metaphorical weight grows heavier and heavier, and the myriad ways in which characters lose people—to accident, to Covid-19, to environmental collapse—accumulate at a frightening pace. More than the sum of its parts, the book works as a crowdsourced meditation on loss and loneliness in an era of instant connection.

An eclectic and engaging collection probing the silence on the other end of the line.