Feels a bit dated but nevertheless a key work in the history of literary weirdness.
The first complete collection by English surrealist Carrington (1917-2011) includes three previously unpublished stories.
Most of these 25 stories are brief gothic tales lush with surprising detail, set in worlds where the supernatural and aristocracy overlap. In “The Royal Summons,” a queen bathes in goat’s milk with live sponges and a talking tree chases a girl. Girls strive to escape nightmarish families in several of the early stories; in others, woodsy half-humans live more freely: a forest nymph in “As They Rode Along the Edge,” who sold her soul “for a kilo of truffles,” has sex with a handsome boar “under a mountain of cats.” The more macabre fables risk being campy but achieve an oneiric, Jungian effect, such as “Pigeon, Fly!” in which a woman paints a corpse’s portrait and discovers “the face on the canvas was my own.” Animals transform into people and vice versa, unsure which is the true self. In “Jemima and the Wolf,” a wild girl with claws and thorns in her hair falls in love with a shape-shifter and is misled by a corpse. Some of the later stories show women fleeing marriages or critique technology and politics, including a short satire in which a tiny effigy of Stalin is exploited to create magic medicine. Carrington’s prose is precise and droll, even when translated from French or Spanish. Her best stories glory in fantastic rebellion against gender constructs and class even as they tend toward shock and tragedy. Quite a few are silly but end abruptly, and there’s a lot of sharp, wise humor, too, with bons mots such as, “How can anybody be a person of quality if they wash away their ghosts with common sense?”
Feels a bit dated but nevertheless a key work in the history of literary weirdness.Pub Date: April 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9973666-4-8
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Dorothy
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
An improvement over The Dead Zone, with King returning to his most tried-and-true blueprint. As in The Shining, the psi-carrier is a child, an eight-year-old girl named Charlie; but instead of foresight or hindsight, Charlie has firestarting powers. She looks and a thing pops into flame—a teddy bear, a nasty man's shoes, or (by novel's end) steel walls, whole houses, and stables and crowds of government villains. Charlie's parents Vicky and Andy were once college guinea pigs for drug experiments by The Shop, a part of the supersecret Department of Scientific Intelligence, and were given a hyperpowerful hallucinogen which affected their chromosomes and left each with strange powers of mental transference and telekinesis. When Vicky and Andy married, their genes produced Charlie and her wild talent for pyrokinesis: even as a baby in her crib, Charlie would start fires when upset and, later on, once set her mother's hands on fire. So Andy is trying to teach Charlie how to keep her volatile emotions in check. But when one day he comes home to find Vicky gruesomely dead in the ironing-board-closet, murdered by The Shop (all the experimental guinea pigs are being eliminated), Andy goes into hiding with Charlie in Manhattan and the Vermont backwoods—and Charlie uses her powers to set the bad men on fire and blow up their cars. They're soon captured, however, by Rainbird, a one-eyed giant Indian with a melted face—and father and daughter, separated, spend months being tested in The Shop. Then Andy engineers their escape, but when Andy is shot by Rainbird, Charlie turns loose her atomic eyes on the big compound. . . . Dumb, very, and still a far cry from the excitement of The Shining or Salem's Lot—but King keeps the story moving with his lively fire-gimmick and fewer pages of cotton padding than in his recent, sluggish efforts. The built-in readership will not be disappointed.
Pub Date: Sept. 29, 1980
ISBN: 0451167805
Page Count: 398
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1980
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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