In the collection's first story, a Japanese woman finds healing in a secret life as a sex advice columnist after being fetishized by her white husband for decades. In the fourth story, Ronald Reagan is reincarnated as a puppy and must cope with being squeezed, dropped, and controlled by his young, queer owner. Doyle's stories are genre-bending and concerned with the devastation and power of being alive today.
Doyle’s debut embraces the strange and even stranger, including aliens that kidnap husbands in the middle of the night. Perfect for readers who appreciate oddities and dark humor with a dash of sf.
In her arresting and sometimes surreal debut collection, Doyle explores themes of repression, experiencing grief, and finding freedom within confining domestic and professional roles ... This surprising, genre-bending collection will appeal to lovers of grim humor and stories that feature characters learning to break out of constricting public and private roles.
The 11 stories in Emily Doyle's bracing debut collection, Please Don't Touch the Body, vibrate with undercurrents of guilty desire, delicious rage, and the bewildering mysteries of the underworld ... Doyle's writing, elegant and mesmerizing, results in a curious, alluring combination of high drama and supernatural mystery ... Spanning an impressively diverse demographic range, Doyle's characters seek and often find relief from life's demands by turning inward, succumbing to the seductive allure of their own startlingly active imaginations.
