I don’t want to like this book. Not because it’s not a lucid, compelling collection of stories – I just don’t know what it says about me if I do. Rachel Kendall’s slivers of contemporary gothic feature mutant births, rape fantasies, acts of bestiality and gobbled-up grandparents. All varnished with the achingly beautiful imagery more commonly found in a Bataille poem, or a film by Lars Von Trier. Once read, some of the descriptions can’t help but find a place in, well, maybe not your heart, but they’ll definitely be lodged in there somewhere. Your bile duct, perhaps.
Despite the relentlessly controversial subject matter, there is variety here, meaning a few stories are structured more satisfyingly than others. Those that disappoint (‘Fly’, ‘IIIVVWVVIIIVV’) are very short, and their language opaque to the point of impenetrability. But when Kendall permits us to access a character, over a longer, first person narrative, the results can be as intimate as they are unnerving. ‘Solid Gold’, for example, performs a careful, insidious seduction on the reader. In it, a woman drags an abandoned motor engine from the street and into her bedroom. Just so she can sleep beside it. As if it were her lover. The scenes of tenderness here are more powerful than those of dismemberment elsewhere. The image of black motor oil sluicing over white carpet is as chilling as a bloodstain on a bedsheet. Similarly, the dreamy-dark metaphors in the eponymous ‘The Bride Stripped Bare’ deserve your attention: “a horse lies broken in her dream street, sleek-bellied, white-eyed, not yet dead but near enough”. That’s an opening sentence that buys you half an hour with me, anytime.
Maybe don’t read them all in one sitting, or on a full stomach. But Kendall’s twisted tales have more than just shock-value in their favour.
3 stars.
