City of Mazes and Other Tales of Obsession

The experience of reading Hendershot's first collection of brief fictions is akin to entering the mind of a serial killer. We travel through most of these stories with a variety of nameless women as guides. They spy on their lovers through oblique windows and read blood like tea leaves. Locked in rooms, chained to beds or drugged, they patiently await the man's return. In stark, fierce imagery, everything is black and white with shades of red scattered about: one man's house ``looked like a chess board where he arranged his lovers like beautiful statues.'' Photography is essential here: in one piece a woman photographs parts of her lover's body to hang on her walls; another story begins with a woman looking at photographs of dead men and choosing her favorite, unwittingly writing her own death certificate in the process. In an impressive contemporary rewriting of Bluebeard, a man with a foot fetish keeps in a locked room the feet of women he's murdered . Smoothly, almost gracefully, fear becomes arousal in this universe likely to make even sadomasochists squirm. Yet we read on. The eerie believability of these tales is a tribute to Hendershot's craft. (Sept.)