You’ve been waiting for it, and now it is here, delivered hot and fresh to your browser, a table of contents for Afterlives 2024: The Year’s Best Death Fiction. Our curator for this volume is Sheree Renée Thomas, the multi-award-nominated editor of F&SF.
Sheree says:
I created several anthologies based on the works that I kept returning to, as so many of the pieces…were truly impactful. It is my hope that readers will think about the afterlife—which is to say, our present lives—with eyes more turned to the magical potential and the importance of each moment. This Afterlives collection has some very powerful, gifted voices that explore liminal spaces, the veil between this world and the possible next (next, next?).
Without further ado, please look upon this finely crafted table of contents. The authors of Afterlives 2024: The Year’s Best Death Fiction are:
I. Breathing Beyond the Veil ( Death’s new robes…)
(These opening stories plunge us into surprising and startling transformations, explore the visceral, immediate shifts that redefine existence in new forms beyond what we think of as conventional, everyday life.)
- “How To Get Away with Living” by Chisom Umeh (Sci-Fi, Nigerian, Ethics, Bureaucracy/Hustling Beyond the Grave?/Resurrection)
- “Drinking Dead Brazilians” by Lia Mulcahy (Queer, Magical Realism, Afterlife, Liberation)
- “Eyes Of My Brother” by Robert Luke Wilkins (African/Indigenous Inspired Folk Horror, Body Horror, Grief, Spiritual)
II. Threads of Memory (who are we here and beyond life, the enduring consciousness and challenge of being, existence)
(These stories explore how our consciousness, personal and cultural memory, and ancestral bonds kind of haunt of us, persist, shaping our identities and influencing the living from beyond the spectral veil)
- “Labyrinth” by Beth Goder (Literary Speculative, Psychological Haunting, History, Memory)
- “The Texture of Memory, of Light” by Samara Auman (Dystopian Sci-Fi, Memory, Grief, Social Commentary)
- “A Proper Vessel, A Perfect House” by Ash Huang (Ancestral Dark Fantasy, Cultural, Possession)
- “Not all your bones are yours” by Plangdi Neple (Afrofuturist Folk Horror, Body Horror, Atonement)
- “Rooms of Our Own” by Toshiya Kamei (Digital Afterlife Sci-Fi, Grief, Ethics)
- “The Lark Ascending” by Eleanna Castroianni (AI Sci-Fi, Memory, Consciousness, Legacy)
III. Beyond the Sacred Veil (stories that explore the rituals, ideas around justice, and the great grand design of life/death/afterlife)
(These stories are set in more diverse cultural spaces and offer other understandings of death, explore sacred rituals, engage with the idea of spiritual justice, and/or explore how choices and actions may live on, requiring restoration or resolutions beyond even the grave.)
- “Unquiet on The Eastern Front” by Wole Talabi (Historical Folk Horror, African, Colonialism)
- “Raising an Ancestor” by Kay Mabasa (Cultural Fantasy, African, Ancestral Connection)
- “When Rain Clouds Gather” by Rutendo Chidzodzo (Magical Realism, African, Justice)
- “Onitsha Main, Ochanja, The Twins, Nkpor, and the Shadows of Shoprite” by Somto Ihezue (Magical Realism, Nigerian, Allegory)
- “The Empty Throne” by Benjamin C. Kinney (Theological Speculative, Jewish-themed, Agency)
- “The Colour of the Ninth Wave” by Katie McIvor (Historical Dark Fantasy, Irish Mythology, Justice)
IV. Celestial Dust & Mortal Wills (stories that confront the infinite, the end…)
(This section of stories confronts some of the broader cosmic implications of death, and/or poignant encounters with cosmic forces beyond our comprehension.)
- “Mister Yellow” by Christina Bauer (Cosmic Sci-Fi, Ethical, Reality, Destruction)
- “At the End of Everything” by Spencer Nitkey (Existential Sci-Fi, Cosmic Decay, Oblivion)
- “The Ghost Tenders of Chornobyl” by Nika Murphy (Historical Supernatural, Ukrainian, Trauma, Healing)
- “Twice Every Day Returning” by Sonya Taaffe (Lyrical Magical Realism, Queer, Cultural, Grief)
V. The Heart’s Persistent Song (works that focus on purpose, acceptance, and those final, lasting echoes of life)
(These final stories anchor the collection with themes of finding new purpose in the afterlife, achieving a meaningful, emotional acceptance of loss, and/or the enduring, transformative nature of love and unique identity.)
- “Leak” by Maria Hossain (Revenant Horror, Environmental Justice, Social Commentary)
- “A Tapestry of Dreams” by Victor Forna (Magical Realism, African, Healing, Choice)
- “The Eleventh Three-Quarters Hour” by Leslie What (Magical Realism, Grief, Bureaucracy, Haunting)
- “What It Means to Drift” by Rajeev Prasad (Sci-Fi, Identity, Emotion, AI, Grief, Purpose, Self-acceptance)
- “A Late Appearance by Death” by Victoria Brun (Literary Speculative, Compassion, Purpose)
- “Fat Kids” by Alex Jennings (Magical Realism, African Diaspora, Identity, Self-acceptance)
Afterlives 2024: The Year’s Best Death Fiction will be available in October 2025—and we’re already lining up good things for the NEXT volume. We’ve got an editor you’re going to love—but more on that later. Let’s read that TOC again…
