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Michele Tracey Berger crosses genre and style to create scary sci-fi horror stories largely based on the lives and experiences of black girls and women. Robust characters and magical storytelling make this collection stand out. —Ms. Magazine
Doll Seed: Stories by Michele Tracy Berger is a dazzling debut collection of speculative short fiction. The stories span horror, fantasy, science fiction, and magical realism, but are always grounded in very real characters and beautifully rendered, distinctive communities. Often thematically centered on the lives of women and girls, especially women of color and their experiences of vulnerability and outsider status, these stories are often playful and always provocative.
Fifteen stories invite you to get comfortable in the dark, to consider freedom and sacrifice, trust and betrayal, otherness, and safety. Marisol, an aspiring jewelry artist is haunted by a fast-food icon. Chevella, a self-aware doll, finds herself in 1950s America playing a key role in the Civil Rights Movement. Lindsay, a Black girl in 1970s America “wins” an extraterrestrial in a national contest only to find her family's life upended. Chelsea and Jessa, two sisters, fight about what a strange child means for their family. A meat grinder appears in a magical forest and chaos ensues. All this and more.
"Michele Tracy Berger’s short stories are off-key music boxes, a masterclass of atmospheric wonder and dread. Populated with a wicked roster of liminal beings—alien visitors and eldritch horrors, sentient dolls and cemetery ghosts—these stories draw uncanny scenarios around the human fear and longing at their core. I found in Berger’s collection the very thing I love most about speculative fiction: raw, uninhibited imagination, stunning in its breadth, poised artfully alongside great wisdom and compassion." --Jen Julian, author of Red Rabbit Ghost
"Michele Tracey Berger has a voice like no one else. Her stories bring wonder and horror and hope as they explore family dynamics, womanhood, what it means to be Black in the United States, and all the highs and lows of humanity. I was gripped from the first line. I couldn’t put this book down." --Julia Rios, Hugo Award Winning Editor
"Michele Tracy Berger weaves captivating tales that leave you feeling unnerved yet refreshingly challenged. It's like being given a tour through an alternate world painted speculative--every concept feels novel and tantalizing to explore because it doesn't shy away from viewing this new world through a racial lens. This is Black Mirror with the emphasis on Black." --Vincent Tirado, author of We Came to Welcome You: A Novel of Suburban Horror
MICHELE TRACY BERGER is the Eric and Jane Nord Family Professor in Religious Studies, Professor of English Studies and director of the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. She is the author of science fiction novella, “Reenu-You,” of books Black Women’s Health: Paths to Wellness for Mothers and Daughters, and Workable Sisterhood: The Political Journey of Stigmatized Women with HIV/AIDS. Her story "Doll Seed" published in FIYAH: Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction, received the 2019 Carl Brandon Kindred Award. Much of Dr. Berger's work explores psychological horror, especially through issues of race and gender.