Nadine Monfils was born in Etterbeek, Belgium in 1953. A novelist, short story writer, film director and producer, for many years she taught screenwriting at the Université Européenne d’Ecriture in Brussels and in prisons throughout France. As a journalist and film critic, she has been a regular contributor to Père Ubu, Focus, and Tels Quels. Her first book of stories, Laura Colombe, Contes pour petites filles perverses, was published in 1981 with illustrations by Léonor Fini and a postface by Thomas Owen, who was a champion of her work. Since then, Monfils has written over thirty novels and directed several films. She lives in Montmartre.

Katie Assef studied French literature at Sarah Lawrence College and recently completed an M.F.A. in creative writing at Brooklyn College. Her prose and translations have appeared in journals such as Whole Beast Rag, PANK, Alchemy: a Journal of Translation, Cerise Press, and Three Percent. She lives in Berkeley and is currently an apprentice with Open Letter Books in Rochester, NY.

Venice was my last island. A dream outside of time. It was the only place where I felt the waters formed a barrier between me and the world, protecting me from human stupidity.

Something in me was broken. I’d lost my appetite for love, along with all the rest. Sometimes when you can’t change your life, you try to change your look: I swapped my black dresses for colorful clothes and hacked off my long dark curls.

I was another person on the outside–only on the outside. Walking past a mirror, I found my reflection strange, but on the inside I still wore black and would often smooth my phantom curls.

Life had made me more and more withdrawn.

I had come here to escape my demons.

My short hair, jeans and boyish suspenders stood out against the ancient, forbidding scenery like a keepsake box floating amid ominous waves. I had the insolent gaze of those with nothing left to lose; only my reflection in the water could still make me lower my eyes.

I strolled down the narrow passageways around Piazza San Marco, and it took a few days before I felt the effect of the strange atmosphere, like a shadow’s veil that falls gently upon you and never lifts.

To love Venice, you have to cast off your old self, to overcome your disgust of the filthy waters, dive in and let them wash away your dead skin.

Despite my horrible fear of rats, I was convinced the greyish water would help me recover the little girl I had once been. Her laugh and naïve gaze–what ingenious armor! I left my clothes on some pier and began to swim. I didn’t leave the water until I was exhausted, my mind empty.

Someone had stolen my goddamn pants. The thief must not have liked my blouse, for it pined away on the embankment, its heart torn to shreds. Instead of panicking, I took this as a sign and sat calmly beneath the Rialto bridge, waiting for an angel to come along…

A bum approached me. His sour breath made me want to vomit. I tried to fight him off, but he had that madness that gives rise to strength. He pinned me up against the cold, damp wall, gripping my wrists in his right hand, and dug his knee into my stomach to keep me still. With the other hand, he unbuttoned his pants and tried to take out his soft penis. He grumbled. Suddenly, he grabbed a bottle of red wine that lay on the ground and shoved the neck up into me. It was the only skill he had left…

I experienced a strange, repulsive pleasure, something violent rising in my throat. He crushed my breasts and tried to kiss me, but I bit him. He yelled and slapped me, and the taste of blood filled my mouth. After kicking me in the shins, he let me go. I felt a little piece of meat stuck between my teeth! I should have bit his tongue.

He walked off, cursing. The bottle rolled on the cobblestone and the sound echoed like an empty cry. If I had to have been raped by a bottle of wine, I would have preferred it to be a grand cru! But it had no label.

A hand came down on my shoulder. I turned and saw an old lady smiling at me. She motioned for me to follow her. Her hair was tied up in a black scarf, and she walked with a limp. Her coat was the color of water, a stormy grey. She took it off to cover me and brought me into her house, a gloomy old place isolated at the end of a blind alley. The rez-de-chaussee resembled a warehouse filled with useless objects. Mismatched chairs were piled on top of one another between moldy crates. A paradise for vermin. We climbed a wobbly staircase to the poorly lit first floor. On a bare table, an oil lamp burned. An old magazine crumbled into dust on the floor beside a broken doll.

That was when I saw her, a tiny figure crouching in the corner.

The old lady murmured a few words in Italian, and the little girl stood. She wore a red dress, a red so intense it seemed unreal. Oddly, when she walked, blood seemed to trickle from its hem. She took my hand and led me into a windowless room. A large candle was all that illuminated the rusty iron crib, half-hidden by dirty curtains. She asked me to sit on the bed. The sheets smelled of urine. And not only that—a strong scent of men, too.

Exhausted, I finally fell asleep despite my nausea. When I woke the next morning, I found the little girl seated at my feet. She was watching me with her little marten’s eyes. I felt as if she was searching through my mind like an old scrapbook, trying to unravel some mystery.  She wore the same red dress as the day before, and I was still wrapped in the old coat.

The old lady came in and gave me a night-blue silk dress. The little girl watched as I slipped it on. I hadn’t seen her smile yet, but maybe she didn’t know how.

“It’s my mother’s,” she said.

“What’s your name?”

“Camarde,” she answered, with a strange glimmer in her eyes.

“You have a pretty red dress.”

She jumped off the foot of the bed and twirled several times like a music-box ballerina. Blood splattered my face and the walls.

The child stopped twirling and began to laugh wildly.

“You’ve got your period?”

“No. It’s my dress that’s bleeding. It bleeds all the time. Ever since I killed the first man.”

“What are you talking about?”

Just then, the old woman called for her in a harsh voice. I heard the Moors of the clock-tower strike their hammers nine times on the bell.

“Come on. My grandmother is waiting for us with hot coffee. We can’t dawdle or she’ll beat my legs with her cane, and that’s the worst!”

“Why do you stay with that mean old hag?”

“And where else should I go, in your opinion? Come on, hurry up!”

The old lady drummed her slug-like fingers on the table. She had a fat nose and the shadow of a mustache. She smelled like rancid butter. A true marvel of nature.

She explained that I’d have to put on some makeup and walk the street to bring clients into her establishment.

“The child’s mother used to do it, but that whore took off overnight. Providence sent you to us!”

What luck! I’d walked right into a mouse trap—the old crone and her bleeding granddaughter ran a brothel worthy of Madame Claude herself.

Well, I needed food and a place to sleep. And anyway, it would be fun to try.

Swaying my round derriere, my mouth painted like a porcelain doll’s, I transformed into a baited hook for dumbfish.

The catch was not miraculous, but I did reel a little something in. Rather pudgy, sallow-eyed, in a clerk’s suit. Garden-variety. Never mind, his shirt pocket was stuffed with bills.

I didn’t want to have sex with this guy, but if I had to, I wouldn’t make myself sick over it. All I had to do was close my eyes to be somewhere else.

The fat fish followed me to the house of the witch and Little Red Riding Hood. The old lady made him pay before going any further. She took the bundle of bills and slid a few into my cleavage. Then she motioned for me to lead the wolf into the sheepfold.

The child sat huddled in the darkest corner of the room. I could tell she was there because of the broken doll on the floor beside her. The man didn’t even notice. He undressed, murmuring some dirty talk to rile himself up. He had the bulbous nose of a wino and a pink stomach the color of vacuum-packed ham. Real appetizing. Beneath this jumble of folds was a little rod to distract from the rest. I let my dress fall to the floor and lay down, obedient, eyes closed. I was already on the islands of the Rising Sun, there where flowers are blown apart by a gentle breeze. I spread my legs and waited like I did at the dentist’s.

The fat man collapsed on me with a gasp.

Did he like me that much?

When I opened my eyes, I saw a large knife planted in his back. The little girl in red stood behind him. This time, she was smiling.

“My mum and I always did that together.”

Afterwards, she helped me drag him to the trapdoor.

“Here it is!”

She pointed to a latch in the flooring. The john was heavy, but the girl was surprisingly strong and together we managed to throw him into the hole. I watched him sink into the waters of Venice.

“The canal passes underneath. No one will ever know. It’s black as hell,” said the child.

“You’ve killed many like this?”

“Only the first one counted. The others, we forget.”

“And the old lady – she knows?”

“We told her they left by the back alley. But I think she knows and doesn’t care. As long as it doesn’t mess with her life…”

She began to twirl, projecting tiny stars of blood onto the walls. Then she took me in her arms and led me in a wild dance.

She roared with laughter.

The post The Red Dress appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Gracie, 2005, 12.5″ x 21″, graphite, gesso, archival inket

We’ll begin with the series Ghost Stories, a series of drawings that Hosford’s states “explores humankind’s ongoing fascination with ghosts, spirits and the unknown. In many of these drawings, I researched and illustrated actual reported events that are surrounded by myth and legend, while other drawings became newly imagined scenarios” (34). This tension between the real and the unreal, the narratives reported and those that sprung out of reader reactions, begins to make us teeter on that grotesque seesaw. For instance, the setting of Gracie is a little girl’s grave—certainly not playful material by any stretch of the imagination. Yet Hosford is able to bring in the gothic and macabre in such a frenetic way, we feel a certain movement of joy and terror. We have skulls, bones, and a dejected looking Gollum-like creature in the right corner; however, behind that sad figure, two faces on the gravestone are either spewing out some form of liquid, or sucking it in. The young person half covered in this goo seems to be giving up the ghost, which exits from his/her mouth, waiting to be caught by a warty midwife. The coils that this midwife sits on connects with Cthulhu-esque tentacles to the monster bursting out of the little girl’s gravestone.

Already, we have the carnivalesque in play with the conflation of birth and death. Perhaps this is Gracie’s rebirth, for that strange being at the base of the gravestone sports beautiful doe eyes and a human arm. The statue of Gracie herself bears a halo in all this glorious chaos, which repeats the glow emanating from the midwife’s hands and the new spirit being born. Next to that ghostly form, a decapitated little girl sits beside her own head, watching the action; beside her, a potted plant. In fact,  plant life creeps here and there around the rather barren graveyard. In a culture that publicly mourns its dead via social media but shortens the time we are allowed to be sad before prescribing the Prozac and other wonder drugs, Hosford’s work asks us to see the vital connection between decay and rebirth.

Thrift Store Spirits, 2006, 12.5″ x 21″, graphite, gesso, archival inket

Of course, dealing with the ghostly does not have to always venture into the macabre. The little girl in Thrift Store Spirits reminds me of how I spent most of my nights after watching my first Dracula film. I forget who played the dashing vampire; all I remember is sleeping with the blankets tightly wrapped around my neck—adequate protection, I’m sure, from those sharp fangs. The girl here has similar fears to deal with, such as the devil making his stock appearance, complete with horns (although a bit on the short side). As in much of Hosford’s work, any kind of threshold or opening becomes a place where strange life bursts out. Notice the forked tongue slinking out of the teddy bear in the right hand corner (is there a serpent lurking within our favorite nighttime companion?), or the punctured hands lying in a pool of blood under the bed, which repeats the glowing hole carved into the person/spirit sitting on the bed. Out of all the characters in this narrative, the figure sitting on the bed most troubles me with his/her glowing hands. Is this a spirit the girl dreams of, or a dark memory she is trying to forget? The arms reaching out for her from the picture frame appear sinister at first, until I see that they’ve created a storm cloud over this ghostly creature. Are they then protectors, one hand to chase away the evil, the other hands to stroke her hair? Other monsters hide behind the bookshelf; in fact, this drawing is all about what is hidden beneath our waking world—all of those secret beliefs we don’t dare utter to our friends or family, or the fears we’re not conscious of, or have few, if any, names for.  The title Thrift Store Spirits also has an air of playfulness, implying that there is something well-worn about this world, or perhaps a little cheap.

Brown Recluse Boys, 2004, 12.5″ x 19.5″, graphite, gesso, archival inkjet

In the Trials of Mara series, Hosford creates a journey into the fantastic for a little boy to find his way back to reason. Lisa Rierson points out that Mara is the “symbol for distraction, disaster, delusion, and obstacles for Siddhartha Guatama” in the Tales of the Buddha. She also notes that the series was created by Hosford after “Two dead cats, a broken engagement, a flooded apartment, and a severe recluse spider infestation.” Given that context, Brown Recluse Boys could be seen as the most personal of narratives, and yet, haven’t we all felt, at one time or another, like the young boy trapped in the middle of utter disorder and attack? The boy and girl baby on either side (playmates of Gargantua, I’m sure) seem to be of little help. On the left, barely-there cleavage hints at the form being female, but, alas, from between her legs an army of spiders launches forth. They are perhaps the deadly brown-recluse variety, but the title creates an ambiguity there. On the right, the boy wears a bullseye, an erect phallic image to his left and another bursting through his head (with what seems like a vaginal slit in center). This may challenge the notion that all males are ruled by their genitalia, which becomes an easy target for most of us to volley a load of insults about men’s sexuality.  It’s not easy being either gender, apparently, but the worst threat is neither babies nor spiders, but the other creature on the bare mattress. This amphibious, alien monstrosity elicits the grotesque in its appearance because we’re robbed of our language in trying to describe it. It looks as if to have been stabbed, with the small trickle of blood gathering at the wound site. However, the spike must be sharp on both ends, for the other pointed end begins to cut through or puncture the bubble which protects the boy. There seems to be very little that he can do to escape or protect himself, which is perhaps why the guide, who accompanies him through this journey, merely puts his tentacles gently on the boy’s shoulders as if to say this too shall pass.

The Flood, 2004, 12.5″ x 19.5″, graphite, gesso, archival inkjet

Hosford’s work invokes the carnivalesque at every turn, with bodies erupting into other forms, always in the “act of becoming” as Bakhtin described it, and laughable images that turn transgressive and horrific. The purpose of the carnivalesque is not to shock one by vulgarity, but to allow the high and low to merge, to have us question unspoken and often subtle oppression that we live under. In an age of information overload, where we are literally being torn apart by multitasking and over-medicating just to sustain this pace, Hosford’s series helps us to reflect, question, and perhaps break through the “distraction, disaster, delusion” of the 21st Century.

To see more of Hosford’s work (especially his Rorschachs, which are beautiful and very strange), please visit his website. 

Works Cited

Hosford, Mark. Artist statement. Cute and Creepy Exhibition Catalogue. Tallahassee: Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts, 2011.

Rierson, Lisa. “The Rise of Reason.” Verbicide. 7 Nov. 2006. Web. 29 Apr. 2012.

The post “Wonders and Blunders”: The Transgressive Fantastic in Mark Hosford’s Art appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Monday’s Child (2007)

I was first introduced to Ray Caesar’s work when writing the catalogue essay for Carrie Ann Baade’s Cute and Creepy show, which was exhibited at Florida State University’s Fine Art Museum this past October. I haven’t been able to shake the images of his haunting, and haunted, beauties ever since. Trapped forever between woman and girl, human and creature, these lovelies radiate a strength and light amid the perils that threaten their very existence. Take Monday’s Child, whose innocence and purity radiate and fill the sphere in which she is encased. While she is “fair in face” just like the nursery rhyme promises, her hands—ruby red and branch like—surely belong to some other species. Is she kept within the sphere for our safety or to be protected? She is certainly child-like in her little baby doll dress, but look more closely, and we’ll see that she’s also sporting thigh-high stockings.  Is she girl, woman, plant, or alien? Might this be how many of our little girls feel, growing up in a strange consumerist world where they are taught often contradictory rules about what makes them special? The clock that sits on the top of the sphere might indicate that at a certain time the top half will open or that the legs will start moving–suggesting that the sphere  is alive on its own accord, a kind of mechanical nanny guarding the precious creature inside.

Asterion (2012)

Asterion plays off of the famous Minotaur, but this curious bull is still a little girl in size, despite the sexualization of her body. She glares at us with a force I’ve yet to really encounter in the gaze of Manet’s Olympia. Who is she waiting for in that barely furnished room, with no shade to cover the lamp’s naked bulb? I am frightened for her and by her, not knowing if she is victim or predator.

Fly Trap (2005)

The same might be said for the little one standing behind the curtains in Fly Trap. Residing somewhere between boy and girl, the young face looks up longingly, mouth open perhaps in song or siren call. I cannot tell if the mouth is bloodstained or if some sick adult got crazy with the lipstick. Her eyes, unlike Asterion’s, have little fight in them, only a sad kind of hunger. But this child’s body, rather than being gaunt, is wondrous in its monstrous form. Spanning three window frames, the delicate yet giant legs are probably the last thing one notices in the picture, yet they frame the entire story, for surely this creature is ready to escape.

Fly Trap (study)

And here, I believe, is the power of Caesar’s work—to infuse these children with a sense of unspoken power. He has personally seen the need for such a narrative, having worked for 17 years in the art & photography department of the Hospital For Sick Children in Toronto. There he documented “disturbing cases of child abuse, surgical reconstruction, psychology, and animal research” (Gallery House). I’m not sure how one survives seeing such havoc wreaked upon the bodies of the young, but I admire to no end the mythic power of art to help heal such wounds. Caesar is unrelenting in showing us the physical and psychological injuries that children suffer—his art has that visceral effect. At the same time, he opens a doorway into the unreal, a place where they might be safe. I often think of the gods who turned Daphne into a laurel tree so that Apollo could not assault her. But Caesar does not complete the act, keeping these little ones in frozen transformation, invoking the power of the grotesque as he does so.

Beloved (2011)

One might say that Caesar is transgressive in his very medium, using the 3D modeling software called Maya instead of brush, charcoal, or pen and ink (Gallery House). Perhaps this quality  is what also lends an otherworldliness to his work, a light that seems to emanate from his work despite its dark subject matter. Beloved and Ebb Tide fall more into the realm of the Weird, perhaps, rather than truly grotesque. I find myself entranced with the pieces that show us the softer side of Cthulhu. Both girls have a genuine serenity in their expressions, despite their obvious (and certainly inconvenient) relationship to the monstrous. In Beloved, the baby’s tentacles don’t seem threatening, but am I the only one who thinks the girl’s face is a tad too close to them? She shows no fear, but neither is it quite adoration. The light bathing her face casts her into the role of some Victorian Madonna, unsure, perhaps, of just what she has given birth to, but obviously intent on protecting it.

Ebb Tide, despite its peaceful scene, still has elements of subtle horror: the giant belt that imprisons her waist, heavy petticoats, and calico leggings with steel tips for her tentacles. She looks off into the distance, perhaps dreaming of the wild life she once lived in the sea. It doesn’t appear that she abhors this beached domesticity; in fact, the scene is one of rather stunning beauty.  Are these our choices for femininity—either dark creature of the abyss or paralyzed loveliness?

I’m not sure you can look at Ray Caesar’s work and remain undisturbed. I’m not sure he’d want you to. There can be a paradigm shift when art holds our attention for longer than a second, when we are so seduced by its contradictions that our minds truly begin to work at untangling them. Because, you see, when we engage with grotesque art, we’re not entering into the realm of logical analysis but into a liminal space where you meet doppelgangers, monsters, and children-creatures—all crying out for us to be more redemptive humans.

To see more of Caesar’s work, visit Gallery House or Ray Caesar’s website.

Image Credit: Gallery House/Ray Caesar. Used with permission.

The post The Strangest of Neverlands: Ray Caesar’s Luminous, Defiant Lost Girls appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.