THE COMPLETE BUTCHER'S TALES

From illustrator-author Ducornet (The Jade Cabinet, 1993, etc.), nearly 60 stories, some previously published—Iowa Review, Canadian Fiction Magazine, etc.—that resemble a vitrine stuffed with curiosities, grotesqueries, and erotic paraphernalia. Written with great verve and a tirelessly original imagination, these tales, though often quite brilliant in their evocation of an individual sensation or idea, cumulatively pall, if not exhaust. Many only a page or two long, a rare few explore more fully Ducornet's preoccupations with religious hypocrisy, sexual repression, and metamorphosis. In the ``Nipple,'' a middle-aged man whose mother has just died decides to marry but then finds all the comfort he needs in a bachelor-party gift of a baby-bottle; in ``Luggage,'' a grieving widower goes on a shopping spree, then says of his wife that ``by dying you have ripened me and deepened me, and in your own wifely and cunning way you led me to the weekend bag'' that will hold all his new purchases; and in ``Bazar,'' set in North Africa, a repressed homosexual who believes ``his life has no other object but spiritual progress'' tries to forget that he has seduced and murdered a young Arab boy. Other long stories are ``Missy'' (a psychotic little girl enacts the symbolic death of a schoolmate by eviscerating and quartering Gossey, ``a small brown, rabbittish'' toy) and ``Outer Space'' (Boo tries to foresee his disturbed mother's moods yet also lead a normal childhood). Memorable shorter tales include ``The Double''—a woman grows a companion from her own severed feet; ``Parasites''—a madman is obsessed with parasites; and ``Grace''—another woman is consoled by the memory of her hair being plaited. With their relentless emphasis on the bizarre, the nasty, and the surreal, tales that provoke and disturb—but generally remain little more than cleverly executed curiosities.