Dreams, Demons and Desire

In, this, her first collection of short stories, Wendy Perriam casts a candid and often humorous eye on the quirks and neuroses of contemporary society. Her characters are, to say the least, diverse:a grief-stricken widow manacled by a set of painted false nails; a son who keeps vigil by his mother's deathbed, fully aware that she isn't his mother; a frustrated painter with an eating problem, and a pregnant young girl who insists she has never had sex and is finally vindicated by a punk angel sporting an eyebrow-stud and a nose-ring. In these 18 compelling stories, dreams are enacted, desires fulfilled, demons exorcised.

Perriam creates a singular world in which self-fulfilment and self-destruction are sometimes only a hair's breadth apart, and where a search for personal redemption may lead to public mayhem. Many of her characters are fighting personal demons - anger, fear, jealousy, obsession - or are torn between submission and murderous revenge.

Others are dreamers, inhabiting their own secret worlds, or forced to come to terms with loss of certainty and security, of faith, innocence or freedom. Love goes spectacularly wrong. Spouses, moving along parallel lines, fail to commune; sons
defy mothers; mothers mourn lost daughters; lovers are symbolically exterminated. Yet there is also much dark humour as Perriam reflects on the absurdity of the human condition and the often demonic force of its desires.


Genre: Literary Fiction