Elwin Cotman Selected Works

An irresistibly unnerving collection of stories that explore the anxieties of living while Black—a high-wire act of literary-fantastical hybrid fiction. In each of the seven stories in this collection, characters pursue their obsessions on paths to glory and destruction while around them their worlds twist and warp, oscillating between reality and impossibility. On display throughout is Cotman’s ability to reveal truths about the human experience—about friendship, love, betrayal, bitterness—through whimsy, horror, and fantasy. Elegiac in tone, imaginative and humorous in their execution, the character-driven stories in Weird Black Girls challenge, incite, and entertain.

In the title novella, Cotman imagines a group of near-immortals living in Pittsburgh in an uneasy truce with Lord Decay. Their truce is threatened when one of them takes pity on a young woman who knows their secret. In “Among the Zoologists,” a game writer on their way to a convention falls in with a group of rogue Darwinists whose baggage contains a great mystery. A volleyball tournament devolves into nightmare and chaos in “Mine.” In Cotman’s hands, the conventions of genres from fairytales to Victorian literature to epic fantasy and horror give shape to marvelously new stories.

Zombies, elves, hobos, Martians, and dragons; musical ghosts and sorcerous retail managers wreak havoc in Hard Times Blues, another trip through the dreamlands. These five lyrical and satirical fables look at the lives of the dispossessed through a fabulist lens. Drawing inspiration from the Gothic, the pulps, rock'n'roll, the Book of Revelations, and anime (to name a few), Elwin Cotman continues to redraw the map of the American fantastic.

A Washington D.C. punk club gets a visit from very ancient—and dangerous—guests. The mythic and the mundane collide at a general store in the segregated South. A young boy becomes apprentice to the Angel of Death. In Elwin Cotman's Carl Brandon Award-nominated debut collection, the humorous mixes with the historical and the epic mixes with the deeply personal. Cotman combines the language of high fantasy, urban fantasy, black folklore, teen angst, punk rock and horror to create American fairy tales with landscapes all their own.

The Wizard's Homecoming is a sword-and-sorcery tale of heroes and villains on a cosmic and human scale. Paired with ten years of poetry, this is the next step in Cotman’s hybrid bibliography.