Synopsis
Victoria Nelson’s stories, set in her native California, and New Zealand, link vivid natural settings with characters caught up in events not of their making. A San Francisco poet is kidnapped by the Russian Mafia; an American visiting a provincial New Zealand town is gradually caught up in her host’s immersion in Maori culture; a hapless stockbroker is pursued by a woman living in an abandoned school bus; a Halloween party on a Sausalito houseboat takes on an unexpected dimension. Victoria Nelson’s previous books include a study of the supernatural grotesque, The Secret Life of Puppets (winner of the Modern Languages Association award for comparative literary studies). She is also the co-translator of Letters, Drawings, and and author of a travel memoir about Hawaii. All the stories have been published in magazines, including Raritan and Southwest Review. This is her first book for Five Leaves.
From an incidental brush with the Russian Mafia in California to an anthropologist gone bush, this series of stories gets wild alright! A Bolinas Venus is a Venus of Willendorf in string bikini with a musky smell and an ability to humanize a younger X'er. A defrocked priest and suicide in En Zed reaches out for salvation from dissolution to an American academic only to sink horribly into oblivion a half a world from home.These stories hint prehistory and Poe, sophistication and H. P. Lovecraft. The images are wonderful and they are grotesque. I couldn't put it down. Slick and deep at the same time!
Thomas Riley
Have you read Wild California by Victoria Nelson? - Add your own review
