Telling it true: Julia Prendergast's Bloodrust and other stories

Something happens to my mind when I read language that has been pushed beyond the conventions, whether those conventions frame scholarly writing, creative expression or demotic speech. The surprise trips some sort of wire, my perception of the world flickers through a buffering process, and then the world reappears, crisp and clear but different. I have been experiencing such effects while reading this intense, poetic, disturbing, captivating sequence of stories. And though I said ‘story’, what I should have said is ‘piece of writing’, because the works in this collection transcend the conventions of genre.