Stone Mattress
Ratings32
Average rating4
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale In this extraordinary collection, Margaret Atwood gives us nine unforgettable tales that reveal the grotesque, delightfully wicked facets of humanity. “Alphinland,” the first of three loosely linked tales, introduces us to a fantasy writer who is guided through a stormy winter evening by the voice of her late husband. In “Lusus Naturae,” a young woman, monstrously transformed by a genetic defect, is mistaken for a vampire. And in the title story, a woman who has killed four husbands discovers an opportunity to exact vengeance on the first man who ever wronged her. By turns thrilling, funny, and thought-provoking, Stone Mattress affirms Atwood as our greatest creator of worlds—and as an incisive chronicler of our darkest impulses.
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DNF. I have given up after the fourth story.
My Atwood experience is quite mixed, with this definitely on the dislike end.
I won't deny that I've had a giant crush on Atwood's writing since I was in high school. I love her novels, but for me, her short stories are really where it's at. You can see her evolving concerns and her evolution as a writer. Stone Mattress doesn't disappoint– the first three short stories are interconnected, and the others are all stand alone. The subject matter is a little eclectic (a werewolf, a couple of murderers, some writers, and a lot of old people), but you can see her current preoccupations. Save one or two, all of her protagonists are older– 60s at the youngest, and the stories deal with memory and death. There's also a weird undercurrent of ambivalence about her own ability to balance the literary/genre divide. Genre fiction comes up a lot, and is often derided by characters or the narrative as “trashy” and not to be paid attention to, and the fans of genre are made out by the narrative to be strange and overwhelmingly obsessed while Atwood still utilizes conventions from those genres. In all, it's an Atwood book, it's well-written, with a deft insight into the human psyche, and also a lot of fun to read.
Margaret Atwood never fails to blow my mind. A beautiful, quirky collection of tales, mostly around the topic of aging, but coming at it from many different views. And vampires.
