Synopsis:
A modern Gothic tale of a woman obsessed with her lover’s taxidermy creatures and haunted by her past.
Things were never quite the same after you started mixing up the species. When Scarlett meets taxidermist Henry, a passionate love affair commences. One year later, on Christmas Day, Scarlett recalls the ebb and flow of their intense relationship and tries to unravel her obsession with Henry’s taxidermy creatures and the influence of his rival, Felix. Both enchanted and entrapped by the isolated rural environment on the Somerset moorland she calls home, Scarlett reaches out to her only remaining family, twin brother Rhett, to make sense of the secrets they share. Soon Scarlett realizes that past promises have far reaching consequences.
Drenched in the torrential rains of rural South West England and the sensual pleasures of the characters, The Taxidermist’s Lover, lures you ever deeper into Scarlett’s delightfully eerie world.
Awards/Nominations:
Bram Stoker Award Nominee for Best First Novel (2020)
My Edition:
E-ARC provided by Net Galley
My Thoughts:
The Taxidermist’s Lover was a book that I *almost* really liked. It has a great premise – a strange woman falls in love with a taxidermist, and as their mutual obsession with each other grows, so too does the desire to create increasingly bizarre rogue taxidermy.
But – here’s the rub for me: it never felt fully committed to its great premise. It felt commercially weird. Like, the author really wanted to write this unsettling story, but still wanted to make sure it appealed to the widest audience possible. Mass Market Weird?
On the one hand, I get that as an author you want to get as many eyes on your work as possible. But at the same time, if you’re going to go for a story that by its nature isn’t going to appeal to all audiences, I wish you’d go hard. And I don’t necessarily mean gory or anything like that. I guess what I’m trying to say is if you’re story is weird, please let it be weird. Maybe Hall was going for gently weird though. Maybe I’m way off base. I just wish the creep factor had been explored more fully. And on that note, that the Scarlett’s backstory was a little bit more fleshed out.
With all that being said, I loved Scarlett’s creepy-ass relationship with Rhett. And like the siblings, I think their names are, like, super lame. Gone With the Wind is just a beautifully shot story of rich, racist assholes (I have never read the book, so don’t come at me if the book is better – but I somehow doubt it is).
Would I recommend The Taxidermist’s Lover? Actually, yes. It didn’t totally work for me, but I can definitely see people who like their weird tempered with ‘it’s not entirely off-putting” really digging on it. There were some elements that I thought were great (the one or two ‘entirely off-putting’ moments in there story) that made it something I definitely don’t regret reading, I just don’t think I’d ever read it again.
Rating:
Overall, pretty good. I didn’t love it, but I’m definitely not mad at it. As I said above, there were some parts that I thought were pretty fantastic.
The Taxidermist's Lover
By Polly Hall
CamCat Books
ISBN: 9780744300376
Hardcover, Paperback, Ebook, Audio
272 Pages
