Review of The Melancholy of Anatomy by Shelley Jackson
Like Gogol’s “The Nose,” but extrapolated, updated, crafted in a deliberately daring manner, modernized, and covering eggs, spermatozoan, blood, milk, fat, nerves, and more.
Casting off abstract concepts like character, dialogue, and plot, S. J. focuses on the human body as an object of dream, fetish, and fascination. Implementing her vast imagination, she swells her subjects to uncontainable proportions. They become palaces, cathedrals, and labyrinths. If Borges dwelt in morbid alleyways, peddled grotesque poetry for psychedelic sustenance, his snippet productions would bring to mind this enigmatic short story collection. A thrilling emanation of ideas, and a visceral ride through gristly viscera, inhabited by the piquant ghosts of our primal fears, our soul-encasing frames expanding to encompass tantalizing visions. Beautiful, excessive, absurd, and unutterably strange.
L. S. Popovich 
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