REVIEW: “Exalted Guests (Or, How Malka Raised a Dybbuk Army)” by Rena Rossner

Review of Rena Rossner, “Exalted Guests (Or, How Malka Raised a Dybbuk Army),” Luna Station Quarterly 23 (2015): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

LSQ over the years has been one of my most reliable sources of Jewish speculative fiction, and Rossner’s story of young Malka leaving her family’s Sukkot celebration to the village cemetary, only to find herself calling out “the kabbalistic incantations she was supposed to only hear, not speak” and speaking in languages she does not know to call up the dead, is another tick in that box. It’s a wild, frenzied story, leaving the reader uncertain whether the dybbuk army is a blessing or a scourge.

Published by

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.