Adam's Reviews > A Pretty Mouth

This is a tremendously ambitious book. It's a series of short stories/novelettes that tells the story of a gothic family in reverse chronological order, leaping through not only different historical periods and their attendant details of setting but also literary styles, including explicit imitation of particular authors. It dances nimbly between genres and tones and references, from Gothic to Lovecraftian horror to comedy to pornography, and somehow pulls them all off and never undermines itself. It's very impressive. I take off a star because the first two and final stories don't really have a ton to offer on their own right. They're fine, but they essentially do things other horror stories do better. Their style and the Wodehouse references (which I wouldn't get, so maybe that's part of what kept me at arm's length there) distanced the stories a bit and didn't really push them over the top for me. The third story is the most overtly comedic, and actually does something Alex and I were imagining after watching the Addams Family films recently; ie, a Weird horror Addams Family. That one is a lot of fun.

The title novella, though, is on another level entirely. It's a boarding school drama, dripping with all the power dynamics and shame and awkward horniness that genre can offer. It's woven into a horror story that really capitalizes on the potential Tanzer has built in the Calipash family through the previous stories, uses their debauchery, incest, gender play, and mad science in ways that are extremely potent where they were maybe campy or weak elsewhere in the collection. It also weaves a theme of natural philosophy throughout that feels both transgressive and historically genuine, and also manages to be thoughtful and consistent where practically every Lovecraftian story would have some superficial ranting. It's also very explicitly (and darkly-more De Sade than EL James) pornographic, which is one of the things that makes it so engrossing and satisfying. It's an utterly stunning story, one of my new favorite pieces of short fiction.