Two lovers accidentally create a love potion while making a batch of Jell-O. An apartment is filled with water as an act of gravity-defying devotion to an acrobat. At turns blissful, absurd, sexy, and devastating, Marisa Matarazzo’s stories don’t just push the boundaries of love—they show how very boundless it is. These interconnected shorts take love to a new level—another world, where a sex fever can sweep a town and where sex acts are performed tied to the raised mast of a sailboat. Falling into love, swimming, and drowning in it, the characters often exist in places where land and water collide and morph. A girl without hands is rescued from the sea by an oil-rig worker. A boy transplants a fish into the body of a menacing neighbor. A woman on the rebound has an unexpected encounter with an otherworldly water engineer. Fusing magical realism and fantasy with the heart of the here and now, Matarazzo has established a singular style. As she shifts effortlessly among startling plotlines and peculiar characters, she celebrates the fluid sorcery of love—in its ardor, its ugliness, all of its uncanny and magnificent manifestations, proclaiming love the most wondrous magic of all.
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From Publishers Weekly
Matarazzo's bold and unusual debut, a collection of interrelated short stories, revolves around characters who all experience heat. In the grotesque Hotmouths, a young girl without hands is saved from drowning by a buoy repairman whose mouth blisters her lips when they kiss. In Fisty Pinions, a girl who has glass ashtrays for breasts falls for a woman who has loved her from afar since high school. In the haunting Freshet, a teenage baby- sitter becomes pregnant, igniting a trend among her fellow babysitters. The town parents, now left babysitterless, set into motion a shocking and devastating scheme to regain their freedom. Cataplasms tells the story of siblings sent to live with their father after the young boy cuts open his neighbor and replaces his liver with a fish. Matarazzo has an admirable ability to surprise, and although at times she seems to be trying too hard to provoke (young lovers lips pop and sputter and sting; two children create an underwater sex rig), the stories ring true. Each scene is rendered so poetically, in a strange combination of tenderness and aggression, that it is difficult to turn away. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Matarazzo’s debut of fantastic linked tales explores love’s provocation, ecstasy, and whimsy. In “Hotmouths” a high-schooler with no hands falls in love with Rose Quartz, a buoy repairperson, when he rescues her from the ocean. Their relationship is complicated by her mother’s strict rules for dating and Rose’s teeth, which become scorching hot when the two are intimate. In “Cataplasms” a traumatized young boy transplants a liver fish in the body of his predatory neighbor. When the boy’s actions are uncovered, he and his sister are sent away to an underwater Plexiglas pod in the middle of the ocean. A series of tales follows one eccentric character and her passionate relationships with an acrobat and then a mask maker. When one particular session of lovemaking results in a potent batch of Jell-O–based love potion, she decides to sell the product, though the end result does not go according to plan. Otherworldly, sometimes unwieldy, abstractions mix with physical elements, most notably water, in Matarazzo’s bold narratives, which make for a distinctive collection. --Leah Strauss
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This book is gorgeous,
By Ramona (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Drenched: Stories of Love and Other Deliriums (Paperback)
Sexy, weird, and totally whisks you away. The sentences are amazing and the stories are like nothing you've read. Should you read it? Right away.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A choice pick for any fiction collection,
By Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Drenched: Stories of Love and Other Deliriums (Paperback)
Love and lust know no boundaries for many. "Drenched: Stories of Love and Other Deliriums" is a collection of short fiction from Marisa Matarazzo as she puts together a collection of tales blending the sensual and the fantastic. Her stories tell real facts of love and the many questions asked as people face it and throughout it. Riveting and thought provoking reading, "Drenched" is a choice pick for any fiction collection.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Alice Through the Looking Glass: 2.0,
By King Fai (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Drenched: Stories of Love and Other Deliriums (Paperback)
Reading the stories in "Drenched" is like lying on the bottom of the deep end of a pool and looking up through that aqueous prism at a familiar world suddenly distorted, but also perfectly clear. These are delicate and vibrant stories, also bold in their execution. They are fabulistic: modern fables describing love and love's wonder: painfully exquisite in their sensual, quirky, dead-on descriptions of passion and obsession, just as they are wondrously exquisite in the precision of their wordplay and inventiveness. How else to properly transcribe and convey the unsettling but familiar world these characters exist in and the circumstances within which they're embroiled and experience so intensely? This is "Alice through the Looking Glass: 2.0".
"Drenched" seems to me a finer, more polite way of saying "drowned", a metaphor that runs through this collection rampantly, expresses itself sometimes subtly, sometimes obviously in each story --"drowned" as in overwhelmed by life, saturated through and through with obsession, or overcome by profound and tidal emotions that sweep one off one's feet and deliver us to unknown destinations. That's what I love about these stories. You may also say that these characters are "quenched" by their immersion in those feelings, or find some escape, commiseration or self-awareness and relief in the fact. In "Hotmouths", a Romeo-Juliet'ish couple are separated not so much by family as physical barriers: she has no hands, and his teeth are made of rose quartz that get searingly hot when "...he is pleased". Kissing him burns her lips, scalds them. "She sucks wintergreen hard candies. She blows wintergreen breath into his open, sleeping mouth. She imagines his roze-quartz teeth steeled cold and frosty..." In "Deliquesce", a woman meets a circus performer and develops a brief, intense relationship which culminates in the (literal) flooding of her apartment, after which her lover leaves and the narrator has this to say: "These thoughts I think, they do not help. In my heart, an aneurysm. A fluid-filled sac, soused milky blue, cerulean. The walls of my arteries go runny." How beautiful, how so right. This is a remarkable collection that hasn't received near enough the attention it deserves.
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