 Les Femmes Grotesques has an impressive range of stories and I found myself marvelling at the plotlines, changes of pace, varied settings and unsettling clashes of the everyday mundane with the supernatural. Les Femmes Grotesques by Victoria Dalpe Publisher : CLASH Books Language : English Paperback : 274 pages ISBN-10 : 1955904235 A Horror Book Review by Tony Jones An impressive eighteen-tale collection which uncovers horror everywhere I first came across Victoria Dalpe back in 2018 with her impressive debut novel Parasite Life, which was a very mature and seriously dark YA (or New Adult even) vampire tale. Do not be put off by the YA label, this book has the juice to shock anybody and when it is rereleased in 2023 I will be interested to see if it is continued to be marketed at teens. It was originally published on the teen brand of the now defunct ChiZINE and fully deserves a second shot at literary success with new home Nightscape Press. It was so good we also ranked Parasite Life fortieth in our Top Fifty YA Novels of the Last Decade in which the standard of the full list was through the roof. If anybody knows how TicToc works for connecting books to readers I strongly recommend they look at this intense LGBTQIA+ themed vampire novel as it stands far above most “TicToc made me buy it” recommendations flooding the older teen markets. You can read my full review here, which also has comments from Victoria: https://www.gingernutsofhorror.com/young-blood/parasite-life-by-victoria-dalpe The majority of the stories in Les Femmes Grotesques have been previously published in a wide range of magazines and anthologies including Breaking Rules Horror Magazine, Ink Stains, Women in Horror 2, Real American Horror, Wicked Weird and Tragedy Queens: Stories Inspired by Sylvia Plath. This is always a good sign that the author takes writing short fiction very seriously and has not released a collection of stories nobody else was interested in releasing. Before I realised that most had been previously published, I did wonder whether they had been written with a theme in mind, as they were almost exclusively (except for a couple) female narratives, often with the main character undergoing some type of change or intense experience. As Dalpe has featured in over thirty anthologies she may well have cherry picked stories in which female characters had transformations to fit her titled theme. Note of caution: do not expect too many happy conclusions, they are truly in short supply. Overall, the standard in this eighteen-story collection was impressively high with Dalpe being adept at skilfully setting often very normal scenes before slowly letting the story fan out. On the most part they were nicely unpredictable, with a range of swift or twist endings which blended both the familiar and the uncanny beautifully. There were also a few I wished were longer as they ended suddenly and I would have liked to see events played out longer over more pages. Others cleverly contrasted the every-day blandness with something uncanny, with the reader unsure when the strangeness was going to drop or play out. If transformations were an overarching theme then Dark Inheritance featured one of my favourite changes. Poor Emiline has a life sucking supernatural creature called a ‘Mara’ slowly drinking her life force and when she is sent to live with an elderly relative begins to search for a cure. But her fightback does not go as planned and watch out for the killer ending, which had a tone reflected in several of the other tales. Unravelling has a sly sense of humour and features a woman who would perhaps rather be human instead of a God who has become bored of smaller ever decreasing cults worshipping her. Like Emiline in the previously mentioned story the God (after she finishes her coffee) decides to take matter into her own very destructive hands. The Rider also has a whiff of cult activity, where Andy who feels very detached from life is lured into a secretive organisation who believe certain people (such as Andy) have the ability to allow others to inhabit their bodies. A word from the wise: be careful what you share! Folded into Shadows temporary abandoned the transformation theme in favour of a traditional haunted house story, which was built upon a smart premise. There is a virtual reality TV show in which supposed haunted houses are given a makeover with some human-interest story, but this tale has added spice, as the participant Agnes has bought Tremaine House, the location where her brother disappeared into thin air years earlier. This was a cool story and you know things will not end well. The Dare was another haunted house story, where two teens break into a haunted house for a dare and regret it, but it lacked the edge and focus of Folded into Shadows. The Drowned Siren was another ghost story, but in this tale the haunted house is abandoned in favour of a restless spirit which tries to lure those who sit at the bank of her lake to their death. Woman very much are in charge and are in control in most of the stories, with The Woman in the Woods being a notable example in which a witch takes control of her own destiny after bringing a boy back from the dead. In Rig Rash the prostitute who narrates the tale does her level best to stay one step ahead of an otherworldly version of the clap which infects the oil workers in the dodgy town of Sanctuary where she has the misfortune of ending up. She spins her story in a matter of fact, non-sympathetic, almost droll manner and makes no apology for her unsavoury occupation. Unhappiness and discontentment thread through several of the entries, in The No Places Beth who is recovering from a breakup has a very unsettling experience after meeting a strange old woman at a remote gas station. The central character in The Wife is even unhappier than Beth and longs to escape her abusive and dominating husband with fragments of memory calling her to another place and a life she has forgotten. Horror of Sycamore Lane features another seemingly browbeaten wife, but we the reader, never see beyond Barbara and Bob’s curtains, in a story told via whispers and gossip. Bob is rarely home and the couple keep themselves detached from the nosy neighbours until the abrupt finale, which unfortunately did not quite match the clever build up. Although it was a nice story the reader perhaps deserved slightly more from the ending. In Those Beneath Devour an occult ritual goes horribly wrong when a popular young woman disappears and in The Guest seventeen-year-old Angeline becomes more that friends with a work colleague of her father who moves into their family home and never leaves. There were also a couple of other noticeably short entries Mater Annelida and The Grove which also dealt with the themes of transformation or rebirth. The Girl in the Stairwell was the only story in the collection which featured no supernatural elements at all, this was a short reflective piece about a woman who finds a young woman dead on a nightclub stairwell and impulses claims to know her and inserts herself into the narrative of the story. And what of the male half of the species? Although Les Femmes Grotesques most certainly puts women front and centre, both A Creak in the Floor, a Slant of Light and The Ranch have wildly different male narratives (and luck) but are equally quirky. In the former Charlie Chan appears at a shared house looking for old friend Pete, who seems to have disappeared. After meeting the oddball assortment of housemates Charlie decides to investigate the basement where he was supposed to hang out. We have all read enough horror to know never to visit the basement! Depending on how you look at things, bank worker James Ashton has much better luck than poor Charlie Chan when he visits The Ranch looking to approve a loan for a rancher looking to expand his spread. But what he finds there is not quite of this world, but hey, things could be worse! Les Femmes Grotesques has an impressive range of stories and I found myself marvelling at the plotlines, changes of pace, varied settings and unsettling clashes of the everyday mundane with the supernatural. I usually read collections rather slowly, however, as I advanced through this book my pace quickened and found myself thinking “just one more” which is always a good sign. And before I knew it all eighteen were sadly behind me. Tony Jones VICTORIA DALPE - LES FEMMES GROTESQUES In each of these stories, the reader is lured into a sinister shadow space, one both familiar and uncanny. Life is strange, beautiful, and terrible in the world of Victoria Dalpe's debut short story collection. Her characters run the gamut from nosy neighbors to boomtown prostitutes, sentient moss to ghouls with a taste for artist’s flesh. The stories contain chance encounters with truck stop mystics, haunted reality show renovations, and cat people roaming the western plains. In Dalpe's writing, horror mixes with humor, and the ordinary with the macabre. Les Femmes Grotesques is a unique and lush reading experience. Tragic and transformative—an unabashed exploration of the dark feminine. Victoria Dalpe In each of these stories, the reader is lured into a sinister shadow space, one both familiar and uncanny.Life is strange, beautiful, and terrible in the world of Victoria Dalpe's debut short story collection. Her characters run the gamut from nosy neighbors to boomtown prostitutes, sentient moss to ghouls with a taste for artist’s flesh. The stories contain chance encounters with truck stop mystics, haunted reality show renovations, and cat people roaming the western plains. In Dalpe's writing, horror mixes with humor, and the ordinary with the macabre. Les Femmes Grotesques is a unique and lush reading experience. Tragic and transformative—an unabashed exploration of the dark feminine. https://victoriadalpe.square.site/about  The Heart and Soul of Horror Fiction Review WebsitesComments are closed.
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