BOOK
REVIEW –MAYA CHOWDHRY AND MARY SHARRATT – BITCH LIT 2006 Crocus Books.
Short stories about women being bitches might not seem very feminist or lady like but this anthology presents many surprisingly sympathetic bitches as well as the nasty scheming variety. There are certainly unpleasant characters in these very entertaining extremely well presented and varied tales. Rosie Lugosi’s MY DEAR features a scorned stalker-lover inflicting a truly horrible revenge on the woman of her dreams.
Misha Herwin’s A FAIRY’S STORY (the only overtly fantasy work in the collection) is about a cute little fairy who reads about the more wicked variety and decides that she’d rather be like them.
Many of the stories are about revenge, mostly over lovers who jilted the main protagonist for another woman, as in Elizabeth Baines’s THE WAY TO BEHAVE though Lynne Taylor’s BIG BAD MOMMA is a very murderous story of revenge for the rape of a daughter, and it is easy to see why someone would want to get bitchy over that. Brighid Jones’s WALLPAPERING features a protagonist who is a bitch for the sheer Hell of it, experimenting in how effectively she can seduce and ruin a married man. (Easily as it happens) Jo Stanley’s DIE YOU BASTARD presents the most sympathetic of the book’s bitches, a woman driven to despair by terminal cancer, and her drive to manipulate a friend into assisting her suicide. Susannah Marshall’s SMALL MYSTERIES features a killer, enjoying a lesbian romp with her victim and fetishising an American lifestyle.
The cruellest bitch is in Chris Scholes’s MOUSE EARS, in which a girl making a wedding dress for her sibling sister deliberately shortens it at the last minute to make the bride look fat as she goes down the aisle. Michelle Green’s FORKLIFT TRUCKS: A BRIEF GUIDE is about a woman learning to drive said vehicles in a factory, despite her manager’s insistence that she should not – She clearly intends to learn just to run her boss over with it anyway.
Bren Lucas’s READER, I MULLERED HIM is about the heartless seduction of a not too bright football star for a kiss and tell media expose by a woman who really couldn’t care less and who has virtually no morals at all. Cath Staincliffe’s RIVIERA, by contrast features a heroine who seems to be immorally contemplating her mother’s murder with her (daughter’s) boyfriend, but who has a very different agenda in mind.
With the publishers being Manchester based, many of the authors are from the city, and the settings are often in Manchester too. Thoughtful, evocative, and entertaining stuff throughout.
Arthur Chappell
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