![]() Her best stories glory in fantastic rebellion against gender constructs and class even as they tend toward shock and tragedy. ![]() ![]() Carrington’s prose is precise and droll, even when translated from French or Spanish. 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. 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. 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 “The Royal Summons,” a queen bathes in goat’s milk with live sponges and a talking tree chases a girl. Most of these 25 stories are brief gothic tales lush with surprising detail, set in worlds where the supernatural and aristocracy overlap. ![]() The first complete collection by English surrealist Carrington (1917-2011) includes three previously unpublished stories. ![]()
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