THE CANDLES OF YOUR EYES

by James Purdy ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1987

These 13 previously uncollected stories--mostly from the 1970's, mostly from magazines and literary journals (Esquire, Christopher Street, The Antioch Review, etc.)--reflect Purdy's familiar fictional concerns: fearsome women, beautiful young men, incest, jealousy, murder, and gothic melodrama. Only one or two pieces, however, suggest the creepy fascination and bizarre verbal flights that have made Purdy's work occasionally arresting or hard to dismiss. ""Mr. Evening,"" at 23 pp., is by far the longest--and by far the best--entry here: a darkly whimsical exercise in bloodless gothic horror, featuring a predatory grande dame who lures a tall young man into her home, hypnotizing him (and ultimately imprisoning him) with her spectacular collection of objets d'art. (The female ""collector"" of men also figured prominently in Mourners Below, 1981,) And ""Summer Tidings""--a Jamaican estate, an impassive (and gloriously bronzed) gardener, the blond-haired lad who idolizes him--is at least atmospheric. The remaining tales, however, some barely more than anecdotes, range from routine to embarrassing. ""Scrap of Paper"" sketches in the love-hate relationship between two unpleasant women, smug employer and snide house-servant. ""Lily's Party"" is a nightmare vision of heterosexuality (one woman passed back and forth between two men, who alternate rough sex with foul gluttony) that perhaps inevitably ends in homosexual passion. Maudlin gay soap-opera is delivered in four stories, one of which attempts (unwisely) to add a layer of religious subtext. And, along with pointless tidbits of revenge and grand guignol (toddler shoots intruder, uses the dead man's blood for watercolor paint), there's a campy fable and a sliver of roman à clef gossip: ""On the Rebound,"" in which a literary salon-hostess attempts to recover her lost popularity by kissing the derrière of a famous, black, gay writer. Very minor, very sporadic flickerings of a limited, erratic talent.

Pub Date: May 1, 1987

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1987

Categories: FICTION