Stone Mattress – Margaret Atwood

Stone Mattress – Margaret Atwood

I really enjoy Atwood’s novels – not so much her later post-apocalyptic works (although I did like them), but her other novels like Blind Assassin and Alias Grace. Anyway I always try to read her new work. This one is a series of short stories – some connected and some referring to earlier novels.

Here is the blurb …

A recently widowed fantasy writer is guided through a stormy winter evening by the voice of her late husband. An elderly lady with Charles Bonnet’s syndrome comes to terms with the little people she keeps seeing, while a newly-formed populist group gathers to burn down her retirement residence. A woman born with a genetic abnormality is mistaken for a vampire. And a crime committed long-ago is revenged in the Arctic via a 1.9 billion year old stromatalite.
In these nine tales, Margaret Atwood ventures into the shadowland earlier explored by fabulists and concoctors of dark yarns such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Daphne du Maurier and Arthur Conan Doyle – and also by herself, in her award-winning novel Alias Grace. In Stone Mattress, Margaret Atwood is at the top of her darkly humorous and seriously playful game.

I really enjoyed these stories and being short stories I could read one at a time to extend the pleasure of a new Atwood story. They have everything I like about Atwood’s works – brilliant prose (her choice of words is poetic), interesting characters and quirky plots (I mean a woman is mistaken for a vampire – although maybe she is one?).

More reviews …

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/28/margaret-atwood-stone-mattress-nine-tales-review-layers-of-experience

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/21/books/review/stone-mattress-by-margaret-atwood.html?_r=0