As we get to Hallowe’en 2017, here’s the first of two reviews from Randy to give you something to read (and possibly keep you awake!)
Come and meet Hepsibah Ballantyne, a person not to be taken for granted…
A FEAST OF SORROWS by Angela Slatter (Prime, 2016)
“Hepsibah Ballantyne! Slattern! Concentrate, this is business.” My father slaps at me, much as he did in life. Nowadays his fists pass through me, causing nothing more than a sense of cold ebbing through my veins. I do not miss the bruises.
One could characterize A Feast of Sorrows as a collection of stories, but it might be more accurate to call it a collection of fairy tales. The cover says they are reminiscent of Angela Carter’s work, like The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, and it is possible Carter inspired Slatter, but I don’t find Slatter’s stories as ruthless, witty or sensuous. I don’t mean that as criticism since the dangers to her protagonists are plausible and compelling, there is often humor both in the narrator’s approach and in the characters’ point of view, and there are moments of physical attraction and erotic feeling that work well within the tales. Further, this collection often displays a distinctive dreamy inevitability that I find appealing: Even when her characters are in danger, even while Slatter describes the world around them in concrete terms that make the stones and woods and houses palpable, her scenes are permeated with the possibility of magic.
Take for instance, the story quoted above in which Hepsibah, the titular daughter, is not highly regarded as a person either by her father or by her community, and there is reason for the community’s disdain in the rumors concerning her father’s methods of acquiring business. But Hepsibah’s craft has a steady demand, more so by prominent families than the poor. Having taken over the business from her deceased father, she is aware of the reasons she is called on to make her coffins: The dead do not always rest easy and her labor assures the comfort and ease of mind of the bereaved, keeping the dead in their grave. In this case, she suspects Lucette D’Aguillar and her mother of hurrying along the passing of Master D’Aguillar and there are opportunities in this, not least a closer acquaintance with Lucette.
“The Coffin-Maker’s Daughter” is arguably the only story in the collection that qualifies as a horror story, having the pedigree of originally appearing in A Book of Horrors edited by Stephen Jones. But the darkness of fairy tales is never absent:
In “Sourdough” Emmeline, a young baker, is content to be Peregrine’s mistress but his fiancé is displeased. As in other crafts, there can be magic in baking, and even a means of vengeance.
Hepsibah makes another appearance in “St. Dymphna’s School for Poison Girls,” the second longest story, in which the secrets of the school open to the espionage of a young woman even as she comes under the gaze of the Erl-King.
In “Sister, Sister,” Theodora, former queen, contents herself by earning her keep at a small inn until her jealous sister intrudes. Theodora has lost much, but what she still has of value, she will fight for.
Sometimes the women in Slatter’s stories prevail, and sometimes not: In one story a wife suffers from the crimes of her husband which in turn stem from something else, something deeper in her past; in another a woman in love responds to the duplicity of a faithless lover.
Herein lie fourteen well-written, thoroughly imagined and engrossing stories of women in and around Bellsholm and along the Bell River (beware Singing Rock). The Feast of Sorrows should be of interest to anyone who enjoyed Theodora Goss’ In the Forest of Forgetting, or the fairy tales in Holly Phillips’ In the Palace of Repose and M. Rickert’s Holiday (scroll down to read the Holiday entry).
A FEAST OF SORROWS by Angela Slatter (Prime, September 2016)
320 pages
ISBN: 978-1607014744
Review by Randy M.
