All the Names They Used for God: Stories

These short stories by Anjali Sachdeva are striking speculative fiction. I judge short stories by (1) if they are memorable and (2) if would I read them again. To this collection, I say loudly Yes and Hell, Yes! I'd suggest this for readers who like George Saunders and many of the best short fiction writers of our day; each story is fully imaginative and beautifully written.
My favorites:
'Manus' - Life goes on but with strange slimy aliens called the Masters who are slowly drafting humans to have their hands replaced with metal fork-like appendages.
'Killer of Kings' - John (Milton) gets assistance from an angel to write an epic poem. Here is an excerpt: " John know he should be glad to see the angel....But she frightens him. Bitter show more white light seeps from her skin, and she has a faint scent about her like crushed granite and ice..."
'The World by Night' - This is a haunting story with much of the setting in an immense underground cavern. It's a meditation on love found and lost; this story is as close to a dream as I've ever read.
The title story - All The Names For God," - In which girls kidnapped by Boko Haram find a way to control the minds of their captors and regain some of the power they've lost. Very powerful writing. show less

Very good collection. I found them well thought-out and crafted, and I quite liked this examination of the ruthlessness of outside circumstances. As for the 'fabulist edge', I agree but liked the earlier stories better than the later, and I feel like that edge gets wider as we go along. This is not a comment on quality (they are good stories), but some collections read like "I write short stories as an end in itself because I love them" and others read like "I am writing these short stories to perfect them as practice for writing a novel." I feel like this belongs in the second group, and I generally prefer the first.
3.5?

"Wonder and terror meet at the horizon, and we walk the knife-edge between them." These words end the introduction to this powerful, haunting collection of short stories. Sachdeva explains in her introduction that in old times people knew better than to trust their gods. "Gods" enter these stories in unexpected, sometimes wondrous and sometimes terrifying ways. I put "gods" in quotations because what enters into these stories is never called god or what is expected of god, but instead is a force, a magical entity, something otherworldly that is hard to put a name to.

Sachdeva's stories take place in many locations around the globe and at many different time periods, some past, others present and one in a horrific dystopian future. show more Sometimes this magical presence offers harm or mischief into the character's life and at other times it offers comfort, but most often both occur. Even when this magical entity is helping the characters out of a horrible situation, there is a terrible flip side to it. For example, the young women kidnapped in Abuja are able to fool their captors by looking into their eyes and hypnotizing them. They continue to use this skill in their lives as they evade not only their captors, but to their advantage to steal from others. And on a deeper level, even though they have escaped their captors, they can never return home as the innocent young girls they were. They have irrevocably changed. In another story, a newly-wed fisherman becomes enamored of the mermaid he encounters off the coast of Newfoundland. However, as his enamorment of the mermaid grows, the rest of the world fades in beauty and interest for him. Now, this mermaid is in love with a giant great white shark and sings to bring fish to the shark so he will be well fed and not wish to eat her. This makes the fisherman extremely successful when fishing in these parts, however, there is an extremely disturbing development when tropical fish begin to fill their nets.

These stories are deep and convoluted. They force the reader to ponder serious questions. There are dark mysterious forces at work within these stories, but such ethereal beauty as well. I thought these stories were incredibly well conceived and executed. There is something unnerving and unsettling about them that touches upon something real that is hard to put into words. The title is so appropriate because there is so much we cannot quite perfectly describe but feel, and many ascribe it to Gods or higher being. I would highly recommend reading this!

Thank you to netgalley for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review! show less

I like short stories and All the Names They Used for God is an intriguing and unique collection with nine stories that examine how our lives go awry.

In “The World by Night” a young newly-married Sadie explores a series of caves beneath her home, getting lost in the beauty of the caves. This was a gorgeous story that I got as lost in as Sadie. In “Glass-Lung” a worker is injured in an industrial accident that seems to ruin his life, but then he finds a new lease on life. In “Logging Lake” Robert’s adventure with a woman he met online goes awry, probably more for her than him. While not specifically named, we are privy to John Milton’s conversations with angels in “Killer of Kings.” The title story “All the Names for show more God” introduces us to a woman kidnapped as a school girl and forced into marriage, quite likely inspired by the atrocities of Boko Haram, as she was forced to convert to Islam. Another girl from her school teaches her a valuable skill. “Robert Greenman and the Mermaid” is exactly that, a fisherman sees a mermaid and is entranced. “Anything You Might Want” is the story of a woman who loves too much until she realizes maybe not. Imagine if our first contact was with a species of blogs whose touch poisons us. Imagine how we might resist. That’s “Manus.” In “Pleiades”, two married scientists create identical septuplets by splitting a fertilized egg into seven. This is the story of one of the sisters.

Wow! That is an amazing variety of time, place, and people. There is continuity, though, a common theme of the unexpected, the intervention of fate, angels, science, and not necessarily for the better, taking people on a new trajectory away from their old lives and into the new.

I loved All the Names They Used for God. Anjali Sachdeva writes like a poet. There is this lucid quality to her prose, she uses restraint, writing with simple clarity. You can lose yourself in her work as in a dream. It all makes sense when you are reading it, even going down into caves or controlling your husband with magic or attaching a hand to your chest.

I love the variety, the creativity, and the fresh and imaginative stories. I can’t wait to read what Anjali Sachdeva has for us in the future.

I received an e-book of All the Names They Used for God from the publisher through NetGalley.

All the Names They Used for God at Penguin Random House
Anjali Sachdeva author site

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2018/06/03/9780399593000/ show less

This has to be the toughest book to review from my reads of 2021. I'm at a loss about how to rate it.

Ever read an anthology where you know something is missing and yet you can't stop reading it? That's what happened to me with this book. I simply couldn't stop myself from going ahead. The writing is impeccable. The build-up of every story is outstanding. The pacing is fabulous. The language, flawless.

Where the book failed miserably was in the endings of each tale. Many stories left me feeling befuddled at the way they abruptly came to a close. You can't even say that the endings were open-ended. Even in open-ended works, there are some clues that make you predict the possible paths the story could continue on. It turns into a show more challenge to your mind and is fun to figure out. But in many of these stories, the ending just jarred. It was sudden, without warning, and felt incomplete.

For a debut work, I think this is a fabulous collection. The author definitely knows how to write. Now she just needs to make sure that she ties up the ending in a better way, either by giving closure to the reader or by stopping the story at a more appropriate point. I'm definitely going to read more of her works in future. She has talent, no doubt in that.

The stories are from various genres such as sci-fi, fantasy, historical fiction, etc. There's nothing to bind the stories in a common thread. So it's quite a motley collection with an underlying darkness.

Here's my story-wise rating where show less

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/all-the-names-they-used-for-god-by-anjali-sachde...

I don’t know how I picked this up, but I am very glad that I did. These are nine tremendously varied and uniformly excellent stories. There’s John Milton, there’s a man with glass in his lungs, there’s a mermaid, there’s a girl who vanishes; more than half of them are on the sff side of the divide, and all of them are pretty magical. I usually find it difficult to write up short fiction collections, and this is no exception, but I really recommend it.

It took me until I was about halfway through to realize that I liked the book (I think I was just in a bad mood when I started reading it and then I was stuck on a plane... :/ ), but then I realized that I really liked this book. Such a great blend of realistic and fantasy/weird fiction. I'm also a sucker for mermaid tales when the mermaids are given more animalistic characteristics than human.