Book Review: Lee Murray’s ‘Grotesque’
According to the afterword in Lee Murray’s short story collection Grotesque, she “steals” ideas for her stories. Murray describes how she listens to conversations, “frankensteins” people’s appearances and personalities together to create characters and uses old legends to twist into her own words and world. I am so happy that I took the time to read the afterword because throughout the entire collection I kept asking myself “how can someone write with such diversity in language, characters, and plot?” If I didn’t know better and without the Maori theme that ties through many of Murray’s stories, I truly would have expected each of these stories to be written by different authors And let me be clear: That is an exceptionally good thing! It is difficult to review collections like this. I am going to be very careful not to give any plot spoilers and I am going to shy away from focusing too heavily on any particular story (although I
Continue reading →