the former royal family, the subtext being that their brutal execution in the military coup was the beginning of the descent into the abyss. . . . Hadnât Assyrians been killed even during the halcyon days of royal rule? Hadnât Iraqi Jews effectively been expelled from their country overnight after being collectively dispossessed? Hadnât poverty been widespread? And the regimes that followedâwerenât they soaked in the blood of the Kurds and the Shiites who were slaughtered and thrown into mass graves? âThe good old daysâ of Iraq never existed. However, there is no simple view of the future, either. With the globalization of terror networks and the spread of propaganda through the Internet, sectarian violence is no longer contained either by locale, country, or nationality. When tragedy strikes near the end of the novel, both Uncle Youssef and Maha offer their desperate prayers to Maryam, or Mary. The original title of the novel, Oh Mary in Arabic, is a more fitting, evocative title for this poignant novel. Gretchen McCullough American University in Cairo Stephen Graham Jones. Mapping the Interior. New York. Tor. 2017. 112 pages. American history is an atlas of the psychocultural scars that transformed indigenous peopleâs autochthonous relations with the land into the measured/measurable marks of settler-colonialism. Itâs no wonder, then, that mapping is the obsession of the preteen protagonist in Stephen Graham Jonesâs Mapping the Interior, a novella about an Indian family: Junior, his seizure-prone brother, Dino, and mom and dad. Only dadâs dead, or rather, coming slowly back to life beneath the house, which Junior maps above and below, in this dimension and that of the sleepwalker, in order to track down his father and try to fix his family, only to learn that it was never broken. Jonesâs novella unfolds like a horror remix of Sherman Alexieâs The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. At first, Junior sees dad as a ghost walking through the house; over time the ghost becomes physical, organic. Dad appears not as he was, a high-school dropout cycled into poverty and crime, but as the fancy dancer he dreamed of being. But Junior discovers that dad is rematerializing by feeding nightly on Dinoâs life force. Dinoâs seizures, Junior surmises, are caused by dadâs vampirism , his selfish eating up of the past to build a new self for another life. Love World Literature in Review 70 WLT SEPTEMBERâOCTOBER 2017 becomes contempt, and Junior murders dadâs ghost, saving his family. In the process , he discovers that structures, like the boundaries of life and death, are mutable. Through agitated prose that mates the self-assured cockiness of preteens with their angsty second-guessing, Jonesâs novella maps cycles of poverty, violence, and colonialism ; of place, space, and time; of genre; of the expectations placed on contemporary Native authorsâof being (and being made to be) Indian. Junior shows us in the end that life as a colonized subject is an agglomeration of these cycles, each with their own grooves and ruts, yes, but also possibilities, like that of the powwow circuit, for reinvention , however small, waiting to be charted. Mapping the Interior is thus a masterful critique of time, place, and memory in (post/ de)colonial contexts that surfaces questions urgent for Native literature, horror fiction, and American history. Jones explores the decidedly pan-Indian , a shared experience of colonization, while also articulating the local, the specific , the totally Jonesian. The Blackfeet author rallies the biting edge of experimental fiction and horrorâs capacity for unsettling boundaries between real/unreal, human/nonhuman, possible/impossible to reveal a family narrative that dances to life despite the (un)death and pain witnessed by Junior, despite confronting the meaning and need of sacrifice. Sean Guynes Michigan State University Marek Ĺ indelka. Aberrant. Trans. Nathan Fields. Prague. Twisted Spoon Press. 2017. 220 pages. Aberrant is a deliberately paced novel. Dealing as it does in sensory description, the narrative is by turns immaculately beautiful and incredibly boring. I wonât judge this as a crime novel, because itâs not that (though itâs billed that way in the ad...