Tress

eBook

Published May 12, 2015

ISBN:
978-1-61220-081-1
Copied ISBN!
OCLC Number:
1237808204
Goodreads:
25477324
No rating (1 review)

Ever since little Tess cut off her doll's hands and painted them blood red, she's longed to live in a gruesome fairytale. But when grown-up Tess can hardly tend her own wounds, how can she free a golden-haired woodsman from his curse? Larissa Brown, author of the Viking love story Beautiful Wreck, crosses genres again with a novella that's part fairytale, part bloody horror, with a dash of fated love.

1 edition

Horror romance?

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Dark. Evocative. Warm. Unsettling. Those are the first words that come to mind after I finished this book.

I'm still not sure if Tress is redemptive love story, or the inside view of the main character descending into madness. Maybe it is both? While short, this book feels substantial, like there is more hiding in the shadows that I didn't understand, that I may never understand. But it is a warm horror, and one I imagine I'll return to again. I found myself equally repulsed and drawn to the woodsman. And, by the end, to Tess herself.

Larissa Brown does an exquisite job evoking dark tale with a modern twist, with a faint echo to Charlotte Perkins Gillman's The Yellow Wallpaper. It also reminds me of Neil Gaiman's take on fairy tales, that they were originally dark tales told by adults for adults, and only later transformed for children, with …