I ran across a reference to Leonora Carrington somewhere in the not too distant past, perhaps as a surrealist painter or sculptor. Reading about her I of course found that she was also an author, and of course acquired her book of short stories. It was amazing.
Here I am on Goodreads:
(Five Stars)
These stories are surreal, wild, feral, with clods of earth clinging to the edges, and scents of life and rot.
The book could be read in an hour or three, but I took days, because I didn’t want it to be over, and because I wanted to savor each one for an hour or a year, and because after each one I felt that having read that story, there was no need to read anything else ever again.
Which is ludicrous, but here we are. The Happy Corpse will thicken and become rideable if you chase it around the tree fast enough. Lots of little insects got caught by their wings in her hair, and she ate them, spitting out their scaly feet.
That last sentence is verbatim from one of the stories (I wonder if that’s problematic at all; nah).
So anyway, you should get the book (in physical-book form, I will randomly recommend), and read it, at whatever pace seems best.
Also, the book is part of The Dorothy Project, from which I notice I already have Wild Milk; did I write that up anywhere? It was, I vaguely recall, similarly wonderful.
(Ha, that page says that Wild Milk is “like Borscht Belt meets Leonora Carrington; it’s like Donald Barthelme meets Pony Head”, how appropriate. Now I have to go look into Pony Head. Wait, this Pony Head? Woot lol.)
Ah, yes, it appears that I did read Wild Milk, and also wrote about it (briefly) on Goodreads.
Clearly I should pick another Dorothy Project book and order it and read it, because they are good. But that would mean acquiring another book. And there are already so many…
Hm?