The doll's alphabet - Camilla Grudova

The Doll's Alphabet is a collection of surreal, dystopian, feminist horror stories, reminiscent of the work of Angela Carter, Deborah Levy and Margaret Atwood. The stories are linked by a grimy, squalid atmosphere, and the sense of being in a familiar yet dystopian world. Many images keep recurring - dolls, babies, sewing machines, underwear, food, wolves, mir- rors - in stories that are in turn child-like and naive, grotesque and very dark. In 'Unstitching', the opening story, a woman unleashes the 'great unstitching', whereby women discover that their skin actually hides their true, sewing machine-like form. In 'Waxy', in a world where it is frowned upon for women to be manless, we follow a young factory worker's attempts to keep hold of her man. In 'The Moth Emporium', a young woman marries Wolf, an older German man who runs a vintage clothes shop. In 'Notes from a Spider', a half-man, half-spider finds love in a great European city. By constantly reinventing ways to engage with her obsessions and motifs, Camilla Grudova has come up with a method for storytelling that is highly imaginative, incredibly original, and absolutely discomfiting.