THE AGE OF CALAMITIES

The past comes to unexpected, vivid life in these speculative short stories.

History repeats itself, goes the famous saying by Karl Marx, first as tragedy, then as farce. If that’s true, then the characters in these off-kilter, even madcap, pieces of historical fiction, caught in the strange loops and eddies of speculative time, may have passed beyond both tragedy and farce into an altogether unnamable place. In the show-stopping opening story, Anne Boleyn, à la Groundhog Day, comes back to life after every attempted assassination by Henry VIII (“Let’s Play Dead”). Joan of Arc repeatedly inhabits the sleeping body of housekeeper Claribel in 1926, Joan bent on revenge and Claribel on annihilation after a series of losses leaves her hollowed out (“Our Lady of Resplendent Misfortune”). In the grimly playful finale, readers take a young female scientist working closely with J. Robert Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project through choices like “To approach the oversized lungs, turn to…” in a surreal choose-your-own-adventure story (“Choose Your Own Apocalypse”). If all this sounds rather bonkers, it is. Ahmad swings for the fences by taking unusual premises—what if many Napoleons rented a house together? What if Nellie Bly met Julius Caesar?—and drives into left field with surreal and speculative plot turns, like talking crows or werewolves that turn into men on the full moon. Doubling down on this weirdness can feel like a hall of mirrors—just as readers settle into a story’s reality, they bump into more illusions. But more often than this effect frustrates, it enchants, and it helps that Ahmad is exceptional at the sentence level: “The heat of July has the wrath of an old god,” reads one description of a New York City summer; thistle grows “in vengeful bursts around the yard.”

A debut teeming with strange delights.