Hair Side, Flesh Side
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A child receives the body of Saint Lucia of Syracuse for her seventh birthday. A rebelling angel rewrites the Book of Judgement to protect the woman he loves. A young woman discovers the lost manuscript of Jane Austen written on the inside of her skin. A 747 populated by a dying pantheon makes the extraordinary journey to the beginning of the universe. Lyrical and tender, quirky and cutting, Helen Marshall's exceptional debut collection weaves the fantastic and the horrific alongside the touchingly human in fifteen modern parables about history, memory, and cost of creating art.
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Deeply strange things occur in these stories and because the people that populate them adapt so quickly, they themselves seem darker, not the types of people we would trust to be alone with in a poorly lit stairwell. There are so many beautiful words, so many disturbing images, and the stories run deep, if not long, because each explores several different aspects of humanity simultaneously. Body issues, relationships, philosophies, psychological landscapes, and fears branch off from the seemingly straight forward narrative, reconnect, or tangle themselves into knots. Helen Marshall's characters are cut off from one another, from all others, but most importantly, the people to whom they should be closest, the ones they need the most. That's the deepest horror at the core of all the others in this collection. Losing love, never finding love, never being loved. Being utterly alone.
