In this debut story collection, Gianni Washington opens portals bridging the strange and the lonely to the gruesome and the intimate. Thirteen dark tales are told through the lenses of Black, female, and queer narrators, among others, which burrow deep into the heart of the gothic to challenge the conventional nightmare. Flowers from the Void unburies a haunted labyrinth of chilling alternate realities eerily similar to our own. A high school freshman is lured into a sinister pact with a classmate that will cost him more than he could ever imagine. A grieving African witch prepares for initiation into a 17th century Salem coven of white women. A girl with no shadow befriends one. Empathy and horrors collide to create a grimy discomfort that will never quite wash off. Otherworldly creatures, malevolent acts, and devastation consume these pages as Gianni Washington resurrects the skeletons in our closets and commands them to run amuck with a new zest for the macabre.
Brilliantly unsettling and unsettlingly brilliant, Flowers from the Void is the debut of a writer to watch. There is enough invention in each one of these short stories to power a novel, the macabre inventiveness of Gianni Washington's imagination only matched by the elegance of her style and her ability to create sympathy for the most monstrous of protagonists. These are stories you will want to devour in a hurry but which will linger with you for a very long time indeed. Ellery Lloyd, New York Times bestselling author of The Club







