Press
"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
"Dila (The Future God of Love) goes for the jugular in this collection of eight afrosurrealist horror stories. … These tales are guaranteed both to tickle the imagination and give readers the heebie-jeebies."
– Publishers Weekly
“[R]eaders fascinated with culturally hued speculative fiction will find in Where Rivers Go to Die a staggering Afrocentric medley that comes with stories that are plot, character- and drama-ready for cinematic adaptation. Much recommended.”
– Eugen M. Bacon, Locus
“These are primarily horror stories, but as bloody as they may become, they are just as often breathtaking. The very best of them stuck with me and kept me thinking for days after just as great science fiction stories should.”
– Little Village Magazine
