THE COSTLY WISH

A volume offers interwoven short stories rooted in the mysterious occurrences in a small Southern town.

Juju’s dynamically crafty seven-tale collection features kids on the brink of adulthood navigating perilous situations, forbidden forests, and a particularly eerie hamlet harboring some otherworldly influences. The volume opens with the unsettling title story, in which a traveling carnival arrives in town with great fanfare. After the fair’s decrepit fortuneteller perishes while granting a local child his wish, her spirit lives on in a makeshift garden the boy plants at her graveside. But when a malevolent interloper invades the hallowed space, there’s a lethal price to pay. This theme of innocent trespassing carries through to the next tale of two sisters who are new in town and restlessly venture into a lush yet forbidden green grove of foliage at the town border in “The Moss.” They join a long list of missing children that has the local police on edge. Other characters begin arriving in the town, like Maggie, a newly widowed mother of two children who has retreated to the place where her aging, cryptic mother, “Momma C,” still cultivates the bountiful strawberry crop that has made her a local organic marvel for decades. Momma C also distributes protective necklaces to anyone she feels needs divine providence, especially her own extended family. At just five pages, “It’s All a Balancing Act,” the shortest story in the collection, manages to sum up the somewhat macabre motivations of Momma C while coming clean about her grisly yet morality-based machinations in a skillful economy of words. What connects all of Juju’s wildly imaginative stories is a sense of otherworldly justice. For every evil deed committed, a counterbalancing act must be exacted, which, however bloodily, settles the score and restores harmony and symmetry to a town humming with the sounds of the sinister carnival at its border. Slim yet satisfyingly potent, these literary offerings deliver an impressive amount of creepy, spooky fun, particularly for YA readers and adult fans of Twilight Zone–type horror fiction.

Less winds up being much more in these eerie, ominous tales of supernatural mayhem.