NONFICTION
Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy, by Melissa Milgrom, $25
When Norman Bates wasn’t slicing up the Bates Motel’s clientele, he spent many lonely nights at the front desk dabbling in his favorite hobby: taxidermy.
Bates’ pastime may be a minor detail in “Psycho,” but it fed the stereotype of taxidermists as creepy guys who play with animal guts. Horror movies “always have taxidermy on the walls,” complains Bruce Schwendeman, one of the many taxidermists Melissa Milgrom hung out with while researching “Still Life,” a … ahem … dissection of a discipline that’s part craft, part art and, at least to this vegan reader, totally disgusting.
“In the name of journalism, I lower my face into the blue bucket, my gag amplified in the confined space,” Milgrom writes of her experience inspecting a pickled penguin carcass. Once her stomach settles, she learns how to stuff a squirrel. Though she never quite gains an appetite for taxidermy — “Why kill (something) just to obsessively bring it back to life?” she wonders — her love of her subject’s quirkiness comes through nonetheless.
Her coverage of the World Taxidermy Championships, for example — a biennial gathering where taxidermists “strut their stuff as celebrated animal artists” — is hilarious but respectful. If Milgrom weren’t such a capable writer, readers forced to contemplate this event might have been begging for a serial killer to put them out of their misery.
FICTION
The Dream of Perpetual Motion, by Dexter Palmer, $24.99
Dexter Palmer’s “The Dream of Perpetual Motion” riffs on Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” by setting it in an alternate America powered by Rube Goldberg engineering and overseen by the brilliant, mad Prospero Taligent.
Prospero — “reclusive genius, the richest person in the known world, the inventor of the mechanical man” — is head of a global concern that manufactures the automata, cameras obscurae, hydrogen-fueled zeppelins and clockwork orchestras that are as ubiquitous in Palmer’s imaginary world as computers, the Internet and airplanes are in ours.
He and his adopted daughter, Miranda, live in the immense Taligent Tower, waited upon by mechanical servants and surrounded by machine-generated vistas of tropical beaches and desert isles.
Like her Shakespearean namesake, Miranda has grown up without the company of other humans. But for her 10th birthday, Prospero invites 100 lucky children to a party in her honor, including the novel’s narrator, Harold Winslow.
In a scene reminiscent of Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” Prospero promises each child a gift: “Each and every one of you will have your heart’s desires fulfilled.”
Harold, chosen to sit beside Miranda, wishes to be a storyteller. Prospero tries to dissuade him: “Storytelling — that’s not the future. The future, I’m afraid, is flashes and impulses. It’s made up of moments and fragments, and stories won’t survive.”
Harold and Miranda are dogged by heartbreak and thwarted romance as they grow up, and Prospero’s clockwork world gradually spins out of control. Imprisoned by the inventor in a vast zeppelin propelled by a motor “the size of a child’s fist,” Harold records the dreamlike events that brought him there and, by recounting them to us, achieves his heart’s desire.
