CHASM

A spare gothic jewel from Tanning (Between Lives, 2001), the Illinois-born artist and writer best known for her affiliation with the Surrealist school.

Seven-year-old Destina Meridian is the descendant of a woman tried as a witch in Massachusetts in 1692, and she has a nascent sort of witchiness herself. She lives at Windcote, a ranch in the Arizona desert, with her eccentric father and Nelly, her “governess” (also one of her father’s playmates in his “laboratory” of erotic effects). Raoul Meridian likes having new playmates: hence this weekend’s houseguests—Raoul’s trusty “chameleon,” Ridder; Ralph Vine, a noted public relations man; his date, Maya, an actress on the wane; Chi Chi, a model who needs his magic touch; and finally Nadine, a beautiful (natch) Cajun on the Hollywood scene, with her fiancé Albert, who are sent to separate bedrooms once they arrive. For starters, Raoul convinces Nadine to cut off her long blond hair (one of his fetishes). Albert finds himself wandering through the house, where he encounters young Destina, who shows him her “memory box” filled with objects of surpassing strangeness—“the claws and tails of gila monsters, skins of reptiles, spotted eggs, even single eyes preserved in tiny jars”—and describes the friend in the canyon, probably a lion, who brings them to her. After a rousing dinner party, the main characters follow perilous pathways to their fates. The first four are picked up by a car in the predawn hours and head back to New York. The rest are not so lucky. Albert lures Nadine into the desert in search of the lion, and Raoul is left behind with Nelly. Tanning lived near Sedona in the mid-1940s after her marriage to Max Ernst, and she describes the desert with poetic precision. While her plot wavers at times, she concludes with a series of truly gruesome set pieces and a final moment of grace.

Overall, great fun, in a sardonic sort of way.