First published 2019
Hadi, a drunk antique dealer, wanders the bomb-scarred streets of Baghdad collecting body parts from explosion sites. Each evening he carefully sews the fragments together in his workshop. When his grotesque creation nears completion, the creature vanishes without explanation. Soon after, mysterious murders sweep through the city. Meanwhile, Elisheba, a nearly blind elderly woman, has waited twenty years for her son Daniel to return from the Iran-Iraq War. When someone knocks at her door one day, she wordlessly admits a man with a mutilated face, believing he must be her beloved Daniel. The evil she has unknowingly invited into her home begins to spread through Baghdad, claiming victim after victim. This macabre tale combines dark humor with the brutal realities of a city where violence has become ordinary, exploring how war transforms both the living and the dead.
Genres: horror, magical-realism, 21st-century, dark-fantasy
Vibes: dark, emotional, thought-provoking
Tropes: dark-protagonist, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Baghdad
Period: Iran-Iraq War
416 pages · Hardcover · Znak Literanova
Content warnings: body-horror, graphic-violence, murder