My Death (light wear) – Lisa Tuttle
My Death by Lisa Tuttle / ISBN 9781681377728 / 144-page paperback published by New York Review Books Classics / minor rubbing to the covers from inbound shipping
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“Lisa Tuttle is, quietly and unsensationally, the finest practitioner of unsettling fiction writing today. She can make you doubt reality, she can chill your flesh and walk you into the darkness with gentle, perfectly constructed prose. Her authorial voice is so sensible that it’s easy to forget, over and over, in story after story, that she’s one of the dangerous ones, the kind of writer that somebody really should have warned you about.” —Neil Gaiman
A widowed writer begins to work on a biography of a novelist and artist—and soon uncovers bizarre parallels between her life and her subject’s—in this chilling and singularly strange novella by a contemporary master of horror and fantasy.
The narrator of Lisa Tuttle’s uncanny novella is a recent widow, a writer adrift. Not only has she lost her husband but her muse seems to have deserted her altogether. Her agent summons her to Edinburgh to discuss her next book. What will she tell him? At once the answer comes to her: she will write the biography of Helen Ralston, best known, if at all, as the subject of W.E. Logan’s much-reproduced painting Circe, and the inspiration for his classic children’s book, Hermine in Cloud-Land.
But Ralston was a novelist and artist in her own right, though her writing is no longer in print and her most radical painting, My Death, deemed too unsettling—malevolent even—to be shown in public. Over the months that follow, Ralston proves an astonishingly cooperative subject, even as her biographer uncovers eerie resonances between the older woman’s history and her own. Whose biography is she writing—really?
“Tuttle’s work to date has been categorized as horror, or speculative fiction, and My Death deftly navigates between conventional storytelling and the uncanny feeling that things are perhaps other than they appear. The theme of the alternate feminist narrative is actually integrated into the form of the novel itself…in the end, My Death is not about death at all, but about life after catastrophe: how art revives us, and how writers live on in their readers.” —Lauren Elkin, The New York Times
