Drenched
Stories of Love and Other Deliriums
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Passion engulfs all in these wildly imaginative stories filled with “a textured beauty” (Aimee Bender).
Two lovers accidentally create a love potion while making a batch of Jell-O. An apartment is filled with water as an act of gravity-defying devotion to an acrobat. At turns blissful, absurd, sexy, and devastating, Marisa Matarazzo’s stories don’t just push the boundaries of love—they show how very boundless it is.
These interconnected shorts take love to a new level—another world, where a sex fever can sweep a town and where sex acts are performed tied to the raised mast of a sailboat. Falling into love, swimming, and drowning in it, the characters often exist in places where land and water collide and morph. A girl without hands is rescued from the sea by an oil-rig worker. A boy transplants a fish into the body of a menacing neighbor. A woman on the rebound has an unexpected encounter with an otherworldly water engineer. Fusing magical realism and fantasy with the heart of the here and now, Matarazzo has established a singular style. As she shifts effortlessly among startling plotlines and peculiar characters, she celebrates the fluid sorcery of love—in its ardor, its ugliness, all of its uncanny and magnificent manifestations, proclaiming love the most wondrous magic of all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Matarazzo's bold and unusual debut, a collection of interrelated short stories, revolves around characters who all experience heat. In the grotesque "Hotmouths," a young girl without hands is saved from drowning by a buoy repairman whose mouth blisters her lips when they kiss. In "Fisty Pinions," a girl who has "glass ashtrays for breasts" falls for a woman who has loved her from afar since high school. In the haunting "Freshet," a teenage baby- sitter becomes pregnant, igniting a trend among her fellow babysitters. The town parents, now left babysitterless, set into motion a shocking and devastating scheme to regain their freedom. "Cataplasms" tells the story of siblings sent to live with their father after the young boy cuts open his neighbor and replaces his liver with a fish. Matarazzo has an admirable ability to surprise, and although at times she seems to be trying too hard to provoke (young lovers lips "pop and sputter and sting"; two children create an underwater sex rig), the stories ring true. Each scene is rendered so poetically, in a strange combination of tenderness and aggression, that it is difficult to turn away.
