Fiction. Poetry. Laura Mullen's clever postmodern gothic is a tour de force. Here enter the stock elements of the generic horror tale: the haunted house, the doctor, the down-to-earth gardener, the chatty housemaid, the sunny morning and dark portentous night. At the center, a beautiful woman is dead. But is she? The tale is disassembled to offer alternate reading -- as a story, as a flipbook, and as a text scored for old and familiar voices. The ancient house the abandoned house the house that has been like that forever ... Dark shape in its bed of rank weeds its entrance gaping but not I was wrong like that/ Forever a shred of white lace at a broken window insisted on history.

Author City: BATON ROUGE, LA USA

Laura Mullen is on the Creative Writing Program faculty at Louisiana State University. She is the author of five books: her first collection of poems, The Surface (1991), was a National Poetry Series selection; her second, After I Was Dead (1999), was selected for the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series. THE TALES OF HORROR was published by Kelsey St. Press in 1999, Subject by University of California Press in 2005, and MURMUR by Futurepoem Books in 2007. Her prose has appeared in the anthologies CIVIL DISOBEDIENCES: POETICS & POLITICS IN ACTION (Coffeehouse Press, 2004) and PARASPHERES (Omnidawn, 2006). She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Prize and several MacDowell Colony Fellowships.

Reviews and Other Links
author site