Little Nothing by Marisa Silver, 2016
This is an interesting story about coming to terms with your worldly vessel. I think. It follows a girl born dwarfed in an unnamed village somewhere and sometime where gypsies and voodoo curses are relevant. Ashamed of her striking ugliness, her parents venture to stretch her into a tall beautiful girl by way of what is basically a doctor's torture device, as if her appearance would change after dislocating joints and irreparably harming bones. It doesn't. In fact she gets uglier and hairier. What comes next I shan't explicitly state but it's quite a thing.
Separated from a traveling entertainment troupe she'd joined, her best and perhaps only friend and most definitely only almost lover is torn and searches for her.
Then we're plagued with wolves.
It's described as emotionally suspenseful and it's pretty apt, especially near the end. It's a different kind of suspense than your generic mysteries and horrors which are intent on tensing the mind, instead focusing on your heart. It had a strange sense of incompletion that initially disappointed me but then I figured the context, themes already covered and events already passed, and it works out in accordance to the whole story. In a sense it doesn't really end, a cycle.
Truly original and captivating.
4/5