 In a woodland location crepuscular and foreign, "The Girl" and her three friends stand stranded in a habitat not too dissimilar to that found in many a nursery rhyme. Like the content of such morality poems, this prelapsarian area has its own monster, the same beast that forced their car off-road. Yet far from being a monster from the Id, "Spike" originates from a more corporeal realm: The Girl's suburban childhood. Like one of M R James's low-bound heathen monsters, Spike prowls the dark lands that separate Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber" from Charles Vess and Elaine Lee's astonishing graphic work "Morrigan Tales". Yet rather than resulting in a series of ill-assimilated post-modern touchstones, its earthy cultivation of a monster's obsession with love's dead bloom is a talon-sharp original.
"There is always some madness in love...." |