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The Tales of Horror
by Laura Mullen Prose 1999, 108pp. $14 ISBN: 0-932716-48-2
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"A brilliant, utterly original, fully realized work that
wickedly out-tropes horror's cliches and devices.... wonderfully
immediate, making an exaggerated, rollicking introduction to many of
the pre-occupations, rhetorics and methods of experimental
poetry."
Publishers Weekly, August 1999
Laura Mullen's clever postmodern gothic is a literary tour de force. Here enter the stock elements of the generic horror tale: the haunted house, the doctor, the down-to-earth gardener, the chatty housemaid, the sunny morning and dark portentous night. At the center, a beautiful woman is dead. But is she? The prose tale is disassembled to offer alternate readings -- as a story, as a flipbook, and as a text scored for old and familiar voices.