Schlock Magazine and The Bitterwood Bible

highresblue4Over at Schlock Magazine Teo Relijic stakes a claim on Marco Attard’s real estate and chats about The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings.

Slatter’s world can take in so many disparate elements because her prose is both rich and assured. There’s a descriptive indulgence in her work that never devolves into tacky excess, mainly because Slatter has a solid grounding in fairy tale narrative structure (a path that Slatter has trod even as a scholar). The general thrust of the stories is always secure, and so details can be piled on without distracting too much from the overall picture. Consider this telling passage from ‘The Undone and the Divine’.

‘The ghosts spend their days profitably, doing precisely what they did in life.  BB jacket frontTrading, gossiping, building, baking, shoeing ephemeral horses with u-shaped things made of smoke and promises, sleeping when the sun sets and rising when it shows its face once more, fornicating as is only natural. Such coupling, however, is unsatisfying, for it produces nothing, neither pleasure nor offspring; ethereal fingers pass through gossamer flesh.’

Ze rest is here.

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