Artwork by the monstrously talented Chris Roberts (deadclownart.com)
Skeleton Leaves: A Collection
By Helen Marshall
Kelp Queen Press, July 2011
ISBN:978-0-9876959-0-1
Special Price (soft cover): $5 CAD + free shipping
Special Price (PDF): $2 CAD
**Free pdf file for HWA members**
“Helen Marshall’s sinister and elegant vision permeates this beautiful book, leaving the reader feeling like they have somehow been transported to Neverland and back, bringing with them the shades of lost boys and their spectral mothers, trailing words flying from between dark stars. Gorgeous and heartbreaking.”
Email: manuscriptgal@gmail.com
—Sandra Kasturi, author of The Animal Bridegroom
“Helen Marshall takes a children’s classic, strips away the flesh, and reveals the dark heart of Peter Pan beating beneath. At once about the violence of immature imaginings and the bitterness of banal adulthood where those imaginings are abandoned, Skeleton Leaves is magical in the true meaning of the word: dangerous and wild and hauntingly seductive. Disturbing as hell, yet extraordinarily compassionate, its ambition creeps up on you to quite dizzying effect. Reading these poems is an awfully big adventure indeed.”
—Robert Shearman, author of Everyone’s Just So So Special and Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical
“With Ondaatje-like resonance and attention to detail, Marshall explores the fatal attraction between a boy who never grows up and a pirate in love with his own death, the deforming ideals of motherhood and the sad similarities between adulthood and Alzheimer’s.”
—Gemma Files, author of The Hexslinger Series
News
I’m very pleased to announce that Skeleton Leaves has been nominated for a Rhysling Award from the Science Fiction Poetry Association and has been jury-selected for the Preliminary Ballot of the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement from the Horror Writers Association!
Introduction
“He was a lovely boy, clad in skeleton leaves and the juices that ooze out of trees but the most entrancing thing about him was that he had all his first teeth…”
So J. M. Barrie writes of his bewitching boy-child, Peter Pan.
It is a haunting image—the lovely boy, clad in skeleton leaves—haunting for its juxtaposition of eternal life and ever-present death, its treatment of the loveliness of the child’s form, the undeveloped rawness of youth, the baby teeth grinning in a tiny, impish mouth.
What is a skeleton leaf?
The Peter I first knew was an inextinguishable ball of light blazing across my childhood imagination: fighting pirates, rescuing Indian princesses, and acting every inch the schoolyard tyrant among his friends. The Peter I see now—in almost Nabokovian obsessive detail—is the lonely sociopath who kidnaps children from their parents and kills the Lost Boys when they reach a certain age.
Like a good mother, I love both these children equally.
This collection is not quite a retelling of Barrie’s Peter Pan in the traditional sense. You may recognize bits of the original text, overlaid or interspersed throughout these poems. You may also recognize other writers interspersed throughout. But perhaps you will also see something new. I would call him my Peter, my Pan, but if Peter has taught us anything, it is that he is untamable by would-be mothers, lovers and authors alike.
