THE ILLUSTRATED WOMAN

Bobe’s collection of sometimes-fantastical short stories features women in situations that highlight the perils and the beauty of existence.

In a Ray Bradbury–inspired framing story, “The Illustrated Woman: Part One,” a young woman visits a carnival with some friends, eventually wandering into the tent of a woman covered head-to-toe in tattoos. As the visitor gazes at different images, she sees different stories: “And they moved, and changed, and showed me. And I found that I could see.” Each of the tales features a female protagonist, and they collectively cover a wide range of themes. In the story “Through Water, Through Glass,” the unhappily engaged Rori yearns for a position at the elite Ocean Study Center in an unspecified city; during a tour of the place, she sees a narwhal. When she later briefly visits her unnamed hometown in the Arctic, the unusual sight of a different narwhal coincides with a near-death experience. In the tale “These Dark Deeds,” Eliza reminisces about the summer she was 13,when she and her younger brother, Josh, went to live with their older brother, Tim, after their parents’ deaths. After Josh goes missing, Eliza uncovers a secret cult that’s been operating in the town for generations. In perhaps the eeriest story, “Indelible,” a young nanny watches her two charges on an “art train” featuring traveling exhibits, but is continually haunted by memories of her sister’s suicide and a “hellish garden of tormented bodies and women who no longer were.”

Some stories rely more heavily than others on fantasy or supernatural elements, such as the demon Moloch in “Come the End, She will Be Light.” Although the tales offer a mix of happy and horrifying conclusions, many are simply open-ended. Bobe breathes life into each one of these miniature works, and each imaginary world she builds is distinctive, whether it’s a college campus or a parallel dimension full of beasts. The frame story is short and sweet, allowing the focus to remain on the winding journeys of the intriguing women in other works. Recurring themes of abuse, resilience, trauma, and choice effectively permeate the narratives; on occasion, though, the symbolism and messaging can be a tad heavy-handed (Rori internally muses that her engagement ring is “so damned heavy” while planning a wedding to a man she doesn’t love, for instance). One tale, “A Taste of Memory,” stands out as much shorter and more esoteric than the others, with an intense focus on the memories and feelings that various tastes and textures can evoke, and some readers may find its experiment to be unsuccessful. By and large, however, Bobe creates consistently absorbing fictional worlds, using smooth prose and dialogue that effectively transport audiences into each expertly crafted milieu. Genuinely funny moments—as when a character describes an influx of demons in a small town as “cosmic menstruation”—appear unexpectedly, as do heartbreaking ones. The author also conjures real moments of fear, which sometimes have a ghostly cast.

A powerful and memorable set of tales that fuse fantasy and reality into women’s struggles.