Of Freud and Grimm

Cartoons in the Suicide Forest

Leza Cantoral

Publisher: Journalstone (Bizarro Pulp Press) 

Pub. Date: December 12, 2016

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

 

 Let's take a little test.

"I feel dazed and hollowed to my core like someone took a melon baller to my soul. I am awake and I want to see the tangerine dream bleeding on the trees outside. I rub my eyes and look around to my melting lashes at all the drunken looking babies glittering in yesterday's glamour, drool caked on their painted tips, eyeliner smudged over raccoon eyes. Party animals snoring off yesterday's cocaine apocalypse."

How does that make you feel?

Are the words still swarming in your brain overpowering the senses. Is your head in the sand trying to forget it? Do you feel suddenly depressed and don't know why. Or are you swooning with delight over the emotional beauty of the paragraph?

The correct answer is any of them or more.

Leza Cantoral swings a powerhouse of a pen, so to speak. The above paragraph is typical of her gift of description but it is also one of the milder ones I could present. Cartoons in the Suicide Forest is a collection of twelve short stories of intense emotions, vivid imagery interplay, and disturbing imagination switch between fairy tale innocence and physical/psychological horror.. Some read like nightmares and others like psychedelic trips. In fact, I suspect one possibly autobiographically based piece of fiction was a psychedelic trip. To say the author's stories are full of sexual tension is like saying a rattlesnake bite tickles a little.

The twelve stories vary in type but all are loaded with emotional intensity. They all have a certain bleakness disguised in sensational imagery yet hints at experiences we all may have had at one point or another. The title story is typical, a coming of age tale wrapped in a Freudian Grimm fantasy of gruesome proportions. "Siberian Honeymoon" is one of the more straightforward horror tales with a dystopic political theme and a feline bent. "Beast" is a version of Beauty and the Beast that you will not see remade by Disney. I'm not sure even Cocteau would have touched it. I must say I get a twisted kick out of "Green Lotus " as it satirizes the new age holistic fads that keep popping up.

And that is just the first four works. Every tale has its surprises. There is much of the fairy tale in her writing but used in a way you may of not imagined. "Star Power" combined sexual exploitation with a weird archtype fantasy of the inanimate becoming animated. The last work, "Planet Mermaid" Is a deconstruction of a Hans Christian Anderson story complete with intense violence and a science fiction lean. Then there is "Suicide Pigs." I do not recommend you read it but you will and you won't forget it.

Suicide seems to be a returning theme here. So is the first sexual experience and the physical changes in growing up. Some of this qualifies as body horror. All of it is surreal or borders on it. Like many of the Bizarro Pulp Press writers , Leza seems to be a poet trapped in prose, at least for the duration of this book. Something tells me her poetry rocks too. But for now, this short collection will probably have enough emotion and intensity to hold you for a little while.