City of Mazes And Other Tales of Obsession

While the twenty-nine stories in City of Mazes bring to mind Robbe-Grillet, Duras, and Kafka, they are clearly the product of a powerful and distinct new voice. Obsessive and dreamlike, Cynthia Hendershot's tales are narrated by the disembodied or never-completely-bodied, those so intensely wrapped within their own Gothic darkness as to seem at once sensuously injured and curiously detached. In spite of their sufferings, their intense longing, the subjects of these fictions remain committed to someone who is careless. Lovers become vicarious participants in a passion that is extraordinarily powerful, even though it is enacted offstage, as if we are all condemned to eavesdrop eternally on our own disappointed desires. With their imagery of cruelty and self-victimization, of blood and violence, sex and love, Hendershot's stories are often shocking and unsettling: we wander with fragile narrators, trapped within a nightmare world where ritual and symbol slowly evolve into an alternate view of sanity.Hendershot, Cynthia is the author of 'City of Mazes And Other Tales of Obsession' with ISBN 9781878580412 and ISBN 1878580418.