“Stephanie Andrea Allen’s story collection embraces the acerbic complexity of Joanna Russ, the practical science of James Tiptree Jr., the moral center of Rod Serling along with the finger-popping, sister sense of your local black beauty shop. Not a combo you want to pass up.”—Jewelle Gomez, author of The Gilda Stories.

In this daring collection of speculative fiction, Stephanie Andrea Allen attends to the lives of Black women, mostly lesbian or queer, all keenly aware of the forces seeking to consume them.

A Black lesbian working the gig economy runs into a trio of motorized scooters and helps them escape from Earth. An enchanted sleep mask gives a woman the gift of slumber, but what will it cost her? A suburban housewife is framed for murder by her homophobic neighbor. And in the follow up to “Luna 6000,” a young woman investigates her mother’s untimely death, and learns the truth about her family.

Stephanie Andrea Allen’s How to Dispatch a Human: Stories and Suggestions is an unapologetic, often humorous, foray into the quotidian magic that envelops Black women’s lives. The eleven stories in this collection are filled with characters who will entice and delight readers as they traverse the worlds around them. With a mix of fabulism, near future, and speculative fictions, Allen reminds us in exquisitely nuanced prose that the fantastical can be found amongst the ordinary.