Swallowing the Muskellunge. Mischief Makers, #1

AWARDS/ACCOLADES: Reader Views (5-Star), The Coffee Pot Book Club (5-Star), Literary Titan Silver Book Award (Silver)A TALE THAT BLENDS BLACK AND INDIGENOUS HISTORIES WITH SUPERNATURAL HORROR. A free Black family. A wilderness migration. A creature that has been waiting for them for generations. London Oxford is a freed man, but freedom in 1800 is a fragile thing. When the Wright family decides to push north into the Canadian wilderness, London has little choice but to follow, loading his children onto a winter sleigh and leaving behind everything familiar.
What he cannot leave behind is the thing already following them. Swallowing the Muskellunge by O'Brien is a historical fantasy rooted in the specific textures of early American Black life: the legal precariousness of freedom, the loyalty that servitude demands, and the grief that no amount of resolve can outrun. Set between 1796 and 1801, the novel follows London and his children from Woburn, Massachusetts, through brutal winter terrain toward Lower Canada, while a parasitic, shape-shifting creature named Matantu works his way into their caravan.
The horror here is not separate from the history. It grows directly out of it. O'Brien draws a sharp line between the systems that drain life from people and the creature that does it literally, and London Oxford stands at the centre of both. Pick up Swallowing the Muskellunge and follow London Oxford into the wilderness. The journey north is only the beginning. A debut historical fantasy that readers of literary dark fiction and Black American history will not want to miss.
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