I love literary ghost stories, and Jamil Jan Kochai's debut collection has been on my list for a while. I took my time with this book mostly because some of the stories are stylistically and thematically challenging, and I wanted to give them the attention that they deserve. Central to Kochai's collection is the experience of being haunted by war, an experience too familiar to those of the Afghan diaspora who have lived under the condition of total war. Set between Afghanistan and Sacramento, THE HAUNTING OF HAJJI HOTAK follows Afghan and Afghan American characters as they navigate surreal situations that call attention to the absurdity of violence. The titular story is not a ghost story in the traditional sense; the narrator, a CIA agent assigned to spy on an Afghan American family, decides to intervene to save the patriarch's life. This is the first story I read from the collection and it immediately drew me in.

My favorite stories from the collection are "Playing Metal Gear Solid V," where the protagonist's game of Metal Gear Solid transforms into his father's village in Afghanistan - under siege by the USSR. I also loved "Bakhtawara and Miriam," a story about a friendship between two women whose fates divulge. I was startled by stories like "The Parable of the Goats" and "The Tale of Dully's Reversion" that call into question the nature of humanity through human-animal transfigurations. The latter is about a PhD student who transforms into a monkey and comically continues working on his dissertation before the story takes a darker turn.

These stories reminded me of Viet Thanh Nguyen's provocation: how do we ethically remember the other, in ways that also consider each other's inhumanity? Kochai's characters are never martyred; they are flawed even when they are righteous. These stories and the writing style might not be for everyone - "A Premonition: Recollected" for example is written as one long run on sentence, and the loosely connected stories are sometimes hard to follow. But this is a collection that I will reread, with each story demanding close attention.

A fascinating collection. Kochai's craft is careful , sometimes innovative, and his sentences are well-wrought. The book is a much-needed addition to the small canon of Afghan and Afghan American literature. That said, I was left wishing he had pushed the envelope a bit more. Not so much with the craft as with the storytelling itself.