The Bride Stripped Bare by Rachel Kendall, Dog Horn Publishing, 2009

I feel I should explain a few things.

Not least the inordinate stretch of time it took me to read a mere one-hundred pages. Or, my stubborn refusal to ever read a foreword, well, first, skipping instead to the main event. Perhaps, more pertinently, my need to recover a little from reading The Bride Stripped Bare.

It took a little too long to return to my surroundings during a quiet lunch hour in a chintzy tea room. It’s the kind of low-ceilinged, overheated place decorated with apple-shaped clocks and Titianesque figurines, that serves great slabs of Victoria sponge and is frequented by mothers of downy-haired infants and elderly ladies with a perpetual, faintly biscuit-y aroma.

Not the sort of place one expects to be confronted with deep-seated and intensely personal fears.

Rachel Kendall’s collection of visceral, nightmarish fairy tales is unified by a loose set of common themes: creation, transformation and mutation. The processes are frequently bloody, painful and result in something unwanted or disturbing, and written largely from the female point of view.
They could be read as a David Lynch style wrestling of phobias onto the page, name-checked by author Peter Tennant’s glowing introduction as a mutual influence. In particular, fear of birth and the capabilities of the female body, the expectation to create. Kendall’s protagonists can consume or be consumed by their offspring, invert or consume themselves into oblivion, or find themselves capable of extraordinary feats of conception, as in Axis, Birth Control and The Seedy Underbelly.

The fear of what might be created or birthed is expressed perfectly in the title story of a tormented mother-to-be and her worried husband, in its description of her pregnancy as ‘this fleshy extension that causes backache and tears and tantrums’ but also in the dimly understood and terrifying responsibility of a ‘gifted’ child.
As such, Kendall is never squeamish about the effluvia of ‘those organic vessels’ and from the frankness manages arresting images like the Wonderland weirdness of the ‘glass-footed’ girl of Eat Me, Eat Me; a fevered re-imagining of the relationship between Red Riding Hood and the wolf.

Where men appear in this collection, it is usually as sperm donors, bystanders, or consumers, as in the bleak dystopian vision of The Pleasure Principle, which imagines a future of endless gratification and madness hard-wired into the brain, and which might slide easily into the paranoiac canon of Philip K. Dick or JG Ballard.
A notable exception to this being Blood Money, serving as an elegant antidote to the dreamy, lustful vampire lore of late, while retaining traditional elements. The black-clad narrator has a criminal glamour, before his late-blooming conscience threatens to destroy him.

As in the most elemental of fairy tales, good is seldom rewarded, and the natural world savage, amoral and cruel. Likewise, Kendall spares little time for exposition or plumbing the depths of her characters – only insofar as it propels the plot. Such economy forces finely wrought description, or results in underdeveloped, if intriguing fragments, like You’re, or the macabre romance of Sweetmeats, whose final image lingers in the memory.

Provocative in every sense, The Bride Stripped Bare may require recourse in something stronger than tea and cake, especially if Nicholas Sparks is more your proverbial cup.