Moonflower, Nightshade, All the Hours of the Day

Moonflower, Nightshade, All the Hours of the Day is a story collection that consists of 9 stories and 1 novella. The stories run the gamut from surreal to slipstream to literary fiction to fabulist to fairy tales to weird biblical fanfic to poem-y word experiments. Over 55,000 words/200 pages of fiction. A few sample stories are available to be read online for free below.

This itch.io page is the exclusive location for the Moonflower, Nightshade, All the Hours of the Day ebook. The download will include EPUB, MOBI, and PDF files. Review quotes on the sidebar are all pulled from Goodreads/NetGalley users. There's also a few reviews below from official book review outlets:

 “…JD Scott’s Moonflower, Nightshade, All the Hours of the Day might be called fabulist, literary, millennial, parable-ish, or bildungsroman, but, as soon as the collection seems pin-able, another enchanting element surfaces. Scott’s range and rhythms delight. In one story, an insomniac narrator ruminates on the nature of reality via Wile E. Coyote. In another, a chinchilla’s death precedes the death of a relationship. A mother disrupts time and space to rescue her son. A twin returns from a watery grave to help his sister make another kind of passing. In a post-apocalyptic world, all land is mall, and all mall is living, changing, organic matter. The collection sings with bicycles, flowers, the vastness of existence, and good old-fashioned obsessive relationships, all in the name of a deep and pleasing exploration of love, power, and commerce, and how to map a life within and without their bounds.”     —Necessary Fiction

“…Moonflower, Nightshade, All the Hours of the Day is a surreal and poetically-written foray into the familiar and the weird. It’s the kind of book that can make the quotidian seem fantastical and can evoke the banality of living in a world that might look wondrous on paper. This is a book that abounds with unlikely miracles and strange damnations; even so, Scott’s fiction is also about such resonant themes as ritual, grief, and the unknown. … Trying to pin [one story in the collection] down to one genre or style is impossible; instead, much of its power comes from its ability to move through liminal spaces between genres (and between expectations of genres). The same could be said for Scott’s collection as a whole. Neatly summarizing it isn’t easy, but experiencing it is rewarding indeed.” —Tor.com

“. . . a dazzling collection of stories—part dystopian, part fabulist, and wholly immersive . . . Like stepping through a looking glass, the stories of Moonflower, Nightshade, All the Hours of the Day  skirt the edges of reality and shimmer with enchanting, otherworldly light.” —Foreword Reviews (starred review)

👼 Book Description 🔮

The sly fabulism of Moonflower, Nightshade, All the Hours of the Day casts its own peculiar spell upon the reader as it outlines a world unsettlingly similar to our own. These stories trouble the line between what is literary and genre, fairy tale and parable. In one story, a perfumer keeps his boyfriend close-at-hand by dosing him with precise measures of poison. In another, a comical domestic drama hinges upon the life and death of an ancient chinchilla. Scott pushes liminality with magical scrolls, a drowned twin returning from the sea, and a retelling of the Crucifixion where a gym bunny chops down a tree in the Garden of Eden—only to transform the wood into a cross for himself. This debut collection ends with an epic novella where a heroic teenager comes of age inside an otherworldly shopping mall that spans the entire globe. Visceral, dreamlike, and full of dazzling prose: Moonflower, Nightshade, All the Hours of the Day challenges us to see our own endless possibilities—to find luminescence inside and beyond the shadows.

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☠️ Story Collection Contents 💐

1. “The Teenager"
2. “Chinchilla”
3. “The Hand That Sews"
4. “Cross”
5. “Moonflower, Nightshade, All the Hours of the Day”
6. “Where Parallel Lines Come to Touch”
7. “Night Things"
8. “Their Sons Return Home to Die"
9. “After the End Came the Mall, and the Mall was Everything”
10. “Fordite Pendant"

🌻 Sunflower, Daybright... 🌞

As of December 2021, by purchasing this story collection, you also gain access to a short exclusive chapbook of 7 additional stories (that's 17 stories total for the price of 1 book). 5 of the stories were originally published elsewhere, and 2 are never-before-published stories. The chapbook also contains a one-page preface with a little more information about the formation of Moonflower... and how these seven stories fit in. This ~30-page digital chapbook is currently available as PDF-only, although this may change in the future.