“There are shades of David Lynch, Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter in this collection of feminist allegories and surreal skits” (The Guardian). Dolls, mirrors, tinned foods, malfunctioning bodies—the seemingly banal quickly turns unsettling in this debut story collection. A woman laments having to send her children to daycare before turning into a wolf and eating them both in “The Mouse Queen.” “Waxy” explores a dystopian world where failure to register for exams can result in blackmail. And in “Unstitching,” a woman unstitches her own body to reveal her new form, which resembles a sewing machine. With the thirteen stories collected in The Doll’s Alphabet, Camilla Grudova proves herself to be “a canny collage artist with an eye for the comically macabre.” While Grudova draws “her images from Victorian and Edwardian aesthetics . . . her ironies and insights about the inequalities in relationships between men and women feel startlingly current (Publishers Weekly).
