Born of Dirt & Dust is a sharp-edged collection of speculative flash & short fiction that keeps changing masks from urban dread, grief-myth, social horror, bruised fairy tale, while staying faithful to one obsession: what people do to survive when the world won’t stop chewing. Across stories like “Smokin’ with Death,” “Pretending,” “The Last of Our Kind,” and the title piece, Renee Coloman drops me into intimate, first-person rooms where love is feral, hope is conditional, and the aftertaste is usually smoke.

What hit me first was the voice: immediate, unvarnished, and weirdly tender even when it’s being crude. In “Smokin’ with Death,” the narrator sizes up Katelyn, pink hair, tattoos like warnings, a body already half-ghosted by addiction, and the dialogue snaps like a lighter: transactional, defensive, heartbreakingly ordinary. The story doesn’t ask me to approve of anyone; it asks me to recognize them, which is harder and more bracing.

As I kept reading, the book’s recurring textures started to feel intentional rather than merely intense: cigarettes as countdowns, bodies as battlegrounds, love as a dare. “The Last of Our Kind” is a brutal little poem of devotion, an oxygen tank, a warning label, and a woman who can’t stop reaching for flame anyway, as if self-destruction is the last language she and her husband share. And in “Born of Dirt & Dust,” Coloman leans into mythic framing, Adam’s rib, inherited venom, a woman trying to outgrow the “dirt and dust” she’s been assigned, turning family damage into something almost ritualistic. Sometimes the prose repeats or swells on purpose, like a chant you can’t quite step out of; for me, that worked more often than it wobbled.

Coloman’s collection is for readers who want speculative fiction, flash fiction, horror, dark fantasy, magical realism, stories that move fast but leave residue, stories willing to be ugly in the service of truth. If you’ve loved the bite-sized dread and emotional torque of Carmen Maria Machado, you’ll recognize the same appetite for turning private pain into a blade with a shine on it. Born of Dirt & Dust is a small book of big hauntings, each story a matchstrike in the dark.

Pages: 215 | ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0FZLMZR77