Customer Reviews

Drenched: Stories of Love and Other Deliriums

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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.

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.

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.

"Drenched: Stories of Love and Other Deliriums" drips with evocative imagination and sublime writing. Marisa Matarazzo weaves together these vivid, sexy tales with extra-sensory intelligence and sharp, primal insights. Just when you think you know where a story is going, the tale takes an unforgettable twist.

This collection of short fiction is a glistening gem. And Marisa is a superb writer. Can't wait to read her next work. Highly recommended.

Writing conducted at the sentence level has always made perfect sense to me. That's what gets me in, writing or reading, and Matarazzo's sentences are the most enjoyable I've read in a long time. Each of the ten stories in DRENCHED kinda blew my brain up in the best way...the smart, funny, exquisitely crafted and consistently surprising kind of way--and not surprising as in forced or trying too hard...I'm lookin at you Publisher's Weekly--just purposeful and musical and expectation exploding.

She's also generous to her characters and writes fiction that makes life more meaningful and makes the world seem like a richer place in ways that skeptics and cynics like myself can believe in. As an often reluctant reader I found myself eager for more, as an often stifled writer I felt like I had permission to the point of being inspired. Do yourself a favor and buy this book...you'll love it!