Life is hard, strange, beautiful, and terrible in the world of Victoria Dalpe's debut collection Les Femmes Grotesques. In each of these XX stories, the reader is lured into a sinister shadow space, one both familiar and uncanny. The characters encountered there run the gamut from nosy neighbors to boomtown prostitutes, from sentient moss to ghouls with a taste for the flesh of artists. They contain chance encounters with mystics, haunted reality show renovations, and cat people roaming the western plains. In Dalpe's writing, horror mixes with humor, and the ordinary with the macabre. Les Femmes Grotesques is a unique and lush reading experience. Tragic and transformative.