Fen
Stories
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3.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A singular debut that “marks the emergence of a great, stomping, wall-knocking talent” (Kevin Barry)
Daisy Johnson’s Fen, set in the fenlands of England, transmutes the flat, uncanny landscape into a rich, brooding atmosphere. From that territory grow stories that blend folklore and restless invention to turn out something entirely new. Amid the marshy paths of the fens, a teenager might starve herself into the shape of an eel. A house might fall in love with a girl and grow jealous of her friend. A boy might return from the dead in the guise of a fox. Out beyond the confines of realism, the familiar instincts of sex and hunger blend with the shifting, unpredictable wild as the line between human and animal is effaced by myth and metamorphosis. With a fresh and utterly contemporary voice, Johnson lays bare these stories of women testing the limits of their power to create a startling work of fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Centered in the depressed flatlands of eastern England, the stories in Johnson's debut collection straddle the drama of transformation in both the uncanny and the everyday. "A Bruise in the Shape of a Door Handle" describes a woman's house falling in love with her girlfriend. So affectionate is the house that it consumes her arm "to the elbow in something that once was wall and now was loose, flabby." In "Starver," a girl is transfigured into a fish. Ignoring her mother's protestations, her sister must set her free in the water once gills begin "shuttering on the side of her neck." These imaginative depictions of entrapment and escape pair well with more ordinary stories. In "The Scattering," a 15-year-old named Matilda falls in with her older brother's friends. "In a town where there was nothing to do," Johnson writes of the group, "they did well at nothing." Their gatherings around an impromptu skate park built into a "copse of thin trees," follow a familiar teenage arc, but Johnson manages to make these scenes as thrillingly direct as any of the supernatural fare that precedes them. "She thought there must be times you caught yourself learning," Johnson writes of Matilda, as she becomes accepted by the group: rather than going from girl to fish, she is conquering the equally daunting task of going from girl to woman.
