My story “Resurrection Points” workshopped with Joe Hill and Ellen Datlow at the Clarion West Writers Workshop went up at Strange Horizons in the first week of August.

I am, of course, thrilled about the reception. Excellent folks such as Jeffrey Ford, Richard Bowes, Elizabeth Hand, Sunny Moraine, Fran Wilde, and Ellen Datlow praised the story. In addition, the story got favorable reviews in Tangent Online and Locus Online (Lois Tilton).

Fun story facts:

1. It was the second full length story I wrote at Clarion and apparently was my most successful effort as per most instructors and my classmates.

2. The first line of the story and the trigger came from a discussion I had with my friend E. Lily Yu about my college days. I said something to the effect of “I was eighteen when I dissected my first corpse” and Lily immediately pointed at me and said, “Write a story with that first line and I’ll read the hell out of it.” I obliged.

3. I riffed off the legend of the great Pakistani philanthropist, social activist and humanitarian Edhi sahib who began doing his charitable work in the seventies by picking up corpses off the violence-torn streets of Karachi and giving them proper burial. Now the Edhi Foundation runs the largest free ambulance service in Pakistan.

4. The story’s core is a rewrite/commentary on the sectarian feuds that break out in Pakistan every other year or so. The major tragedy here was the March 2013 burning of the (predominantly Christian) Joseph Colony by a Muslim mob in Lahore, Pakistan.

5. As far as I know, it is the first horror story set in Pakistan by an indigenous writer to appear in a major English language speculative fiction magazine. That by itself makes me quite happy.

Go read it now if you like.