Rachel Kendall’s The Bride Stripped Bare, a collection of stories, is at turns appalling and wondrous, a repository of evil vignettes that aim for the dark heart of contemporary society. Kendall’s stories – brief, often one-note short-shorts — are thin sketches structured with the rhythms of fairy tales, and colored with the hues of sex, violence, and a sort of deliberate, luxuriant perversity. These vignettes are nonetheless richly written; her prose a heady mixture of rococo extravagance and incisive minimalism.
Her protagonists tend to be unhappy misfits and castoffs, often yearning for violence, especially sexual violence. They tend to find redemption in transformation or in the solace of oblivion, and if these require blood or viscera, so much the better. The solution to this yearning, to the extent that solutions are possible, are acts of creation (or reinvention), which often come at a cost. Pregnancy itself is naturally a theme, specifically the way pregnancy can distort and transform, the way it deforms one being in order to create another.
These characters are by necessity skeletonlike, often embodying only a single impulse; they are examples of need made manifest. Kendall dwells little on plot or character development and more on psychology, nesting comfortably inside these characters as they reveal the horrors that torment them – or the ones they long for. The setting is a limbo, alternately contemporary and antique, and often ambiguous enough to enhance the reader’s discomfort. Her lush descriptions are decorated with gothic trappings – gothic in the modern sense – and marry old-fashioned prose with cutting-edge perversities. The resulting vibe is equal parts de Sade and Kathy Acker – transgressive, but timelessly so.
Kendall’s characters reveal certain consistent concerns: an interest (or perhaps an obsession) with physicality, especially physical beauty, or the lack of it. Polite society is seen as a construct to be reviled, ignored, abhorred, and (above all) seen through – its artifice a source of relentless suffering. Beyond it lies truth as well as madness. Stories tend to resolve themselves either by taking turns for the worse, or by revealing resolutions to grit teeth and endure the pain. The stories are like crowbars, prying away pretenses. What is revealed may be ugly or distasteful, but at least it’s real.
This is not to say the stories are dark and hopeless. In Kendall’s hands, language itself provides a beacon. The writing is at times sumptuous; her descriptions, in particular, are skilful and elegiac. These are not happy stories, but they are the visions of an author eager to see through societal facades to get at coarse truths, and in this the stories offer a kind of catharsis. Kendall’s gloomy tales, as abusive as they can sometimes be, cast sparks of illumination, and in the end, after the grue has been washed away, these are what linger longest in the mind.
Review by Christopher Morris
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This isn’t asked antagonistically–really I dig the review and the piece sounds interesting–but do you actually view pregnancy as a deformation?