Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead

by Barbara Comyns, Brian Evenson (Introduction)

Overview

Fiction. This is the story of the Willoweed family and the English village in which they live. It begins mid-flood, ducks swimming in the drawing-room windows, "quacking their approval" as they sail around the room. "What about my rose beds?" demands Grandmother Willoweed. Her son shouts down her ear-trumpet that the garden is submerged, dead animals everywhere, she will be lucky to get a bunch. Then the miller drowns himself...then the butcher slits his throat...and a series of gruesome deaths plagues the villagers. The newspaper asks, "Who will be smitten by this fatal madness next?" Through it all, Comyns' unique voice weaves a text as wonderful as it is horrible, as beautiful as it is cruel. Originally published in England in 1954, this "overlooked small masterpiece" is a twisted, tragicomic gem.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780984469314
Publisher:	Dorothy, a publishing project
Publication date:	11/15/2010
Pages:	216
Sales rank:	135,105
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 7.00(h) x 0.70(d)

Editorial Reviews

Originally published in 1954 and largely overlooked in its time, Comyns's dark novel begins in the midst of a devastating flood in a small English village. As the "ducks swim through the drawing-room windows" the Willoweed family surveys the damage. "Grandmother Willoweed" ("a dreadful old black bird, enormous and horrifying, all weighed down by jet and black plumes") shares the estate with her preacher son Ebin, recently made a widower, his three motherless children and their servants, a handyman called Old Ives, and two domestics. Shortly after the flood, several villagers become afflicted with a mysterious illness, causing some to commit suicide. When the pitiful Ebin loses one of his children to the sickness as well, he becomes determined to sever ties with his family's insufferable matriarch and, he hopes, improve his life. Evenson notes in his introduction that Comyns's "third person narration is quite democratic in terms of who it chooses to attend to" and indeed she shifts perspectives from the Willoweeds to various doomed members of the community with the ease and dexterity of a natural storyteller. Her dark, nightmare-inducing imagery makes for an unforgettable read, then and now.
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