"The stories of Dilman Dila leap
from the page and grab you by the throat with intrigue and urgent
imagination. An impressive American debut!"
—Tananarive
Due, American Book Award winner
“Get ready for strange truths written
in pure, powerful words. Frightened and curious, hopeful and
brave, the heroes of Dila’s stories lead his readers through razor
sharp dangers to the rewards gleaming at every one of his stories’
surprising and satisfying ends. From sheer delight in the
futuristic flight of Ugandan ornithopters, to sweetly nasty certainty
as to the alien identity of the “savages” bedeviling clueless
white colonizers, Dila delivers pleasure after pleasure to minds
eager for fiction’s freshest glories.”
—Nisi Shawl, award-winning editor of
New Suns and author of Everfair
“A book filled with spirits,
monsters, resource wars, techno organic horrors, trans dimensional
beings, wondrous machines, and so much more. Where Rivers Go to
Die reads like literary episodes of Love, Death, and
Robots meets Black Mirror, doused in African fantasy,
folklore, and futurism. Dilman Dila shines here as one of the most
creative storytellers of our age, weaving together an impressive set
of imaginative, character driven, and reality-bending tales examining
issues of everyday life, gender, spiritualism, politics, war, and
exploitation through the lens of the strange, the bizarre, and the
otherworldly. The genre needs more like this!”
—P.
Djèlí Clark, author of A Master of Djinn and Ring Shout
"Amongst contemporary storytellers of the Afrocentric speculative, Dilman Dila's work inhabits a locus occupied by few others. Every tale thins the border between the is and the could-be: boosted by straospheric imagination while grounding you in the concerns of the contemporary African. I never pass up an opportunity to read a Dilman Dila story."
—Suyi Davies Okungbowa, author of Son of the Storm
"Dilman Dila deals in dualities.
This collection by one of Africa's most consistent
speculative fiction authors is an excellent showcase of his
ability to defy genre and effortlessly blend superstition and
science, fear and fascination, reality and unreality, uniqueness and
universality, into wonderful, exciting stories steeped in culture.
Full of immersive worldbuilding and a persistent horror sensibility
rendered in sharp, efficient prose, Where Rivers Go to
Die is a highly enjoyable read."
—Wole
Talabi, award-winning author of Incomplete Solutions and
editor of Africanfuturism:
An Anthology.
''Dilman Dila is a well-established
figure in the African Speculative scene. His various disciplines
-film-making, animation, writing etc - inform all aspects of his work
holistically. Among the results are thoughtful, deep-reaching tales,
constructed upon a firmament of rounded research and experiential
detail. His sparse, journalistic style amplifies the strangeness of
his narratives and at times his voice resembles a slightly
supernatural Hemingway.'"
—Nikhil Singh, author of Taty Went
West and Club Ded
