Alone

Set in Australia, this is a painfully sensuous chronicle of a young woman's obsession with violent love and violent death. Her world is a nightmarish still-life, comprised of a spider-infested boarding house, a dank cafe, and a remote Gothic university, where her lesbian lover lives. The book is populated by grotesque caricatures of rotting humanity that mirror the woman's anguish over her lover's absence. The boys are pustular, the men, violent. Old whores caulk their wrinkles. Candles forever drip with black death. Droning themes and self-absorbed poems repeat themselves, and then crescendo on cue to a terrifying finale. Farmer possesses a distinct gift for exaggerating isolated moments of human passionthen returning, at the right moment, to the ugly yet poetic reality of her characters' lives. November