The Pillow Friend

My first taste of Lisa Tuttle has left me wanting for more. Wonderfully dark and surreal, it is written the language of dreams, and more than a story, it's an atmosphere and a landscape of madness. It is an uncanny reflection of real life and it's sometimes difficult to draw the line between reality and dream. Fantastic!

This is the story of a woman and the various fetishes that accompany her from youth to adulthood, from an antique doll given her by an aunt, to a boy at school, to an English poet whose photo she finds at her aunt's forest home, and even stranger things.

I really enjoyed reading about her as a child and teenager, but once she hits her twenties the novel becomes a full-on romance story for about 100 pages (though it feels much longer). The weirdness does finally return, and there is an intense if ambiguous conclusion. An interesting work of magical realism, or maybe surrealism, if you can get through the middle section.

Tiptree shortlist 1996. I don't know how this got onto the Tiptree list - it says nothing about gender and is merely a woman obsessing about one man after another. I got half way through and gave up. The fantasy element was predictable.

Lisa Tuttle written a little strange book, but good to read. The Pillow Friend is good book to the pillow:)

A Strange but good book.

A Strange but good book.