A Pretty Mouth

praise for

A Pretty Mouth

“
A Pretty Mouth
is a fine and stylish collection that pays homage to the tradition of the weird while blazing its own sinister mark. Tanzer’s debut is as sharp and polished as any I’ve seen.”

—
LAIRD BARRON,
author of The Croning

“If Hieronymus Bosch and William Hogarth had together designed a Fabergé egg, the final result could not be more beautifully and deliciously perverse than what awaits the readers in
A Pretty Mouth
. Molly Tanzer’s first novel is a witty history of the centuries-long exploits of one joyfully corrupt (and somewhat moist) Calipash dynasty, a family both cursed and elevated by darkness of the most squamous sort. This is a sly and sparkling jewel of a book, and I can’t recommend it enough—get
A Pretty Mouth
in your hands or tentacles, post-haste, and prepare to be shocked, charmed, and (somewhat moistly) entertained!”

—
LIVIA LLEWELLYN
, author of
Engines of Desire

“Molly Tanzer is a prose Edward Gorey, decadent, delicious, and ever so slightly mad.”

—
NATHAN LONG
, author of
Jane Carver of Waar

“This is form and content and diction and tone and imagination all looking up at the exact same moment: when Molly Tanzer claps once at the front of the classroom.”

—
STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES
, author of
The Last Final Girl

“Had the nineteenth century really been like this—with the flounces and corsets and blood and tentacles and whatnot—we’d all be dead by now. Unlucky us, but lucky you, Dear Reader, as you are alive to read this book.”

—
NICK MAMATAS
, author of
Bullettime

“The stories and short novel in Molly Tanzer’s impressive debut collection move steadily backwards through English history, from an Edwardian resort to a Roman encampment, stopping on the way for the nineteenth, eighteenth, and seventeenth centuries, all in the interest of tracing the main trunk of the notorious Calipash family tree all the way to its roots. It’s a line marked by its excesses of sensuality, cruelty, and sorcery, and in excerpting the exploits of its storied members, Tanzer demonstrates her facility with a variety of voices and styles, from Wodehousian farce to Victorian erotica to Restoration class comedy. Each of the narratives collected here stands and succeeds on its own terms, but taken together, they add to a whole greater than the sum of its parts, in which the recurrence of key motifs in a diversity of settings creates the sense of a family living out its doom generation after generation. Tanzer is an ambitious writer, and she is talented enough for her ambition to matter.”

—
JOHN LANGAN
, author of
The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies

“
A Pretty Mouth
is many things; erudite, hilarious, profane, moving, learned, engaging, horrific, terrifying, and profound. Molly moves through the multi-forms of prose like a shark in wine-dark seas, rife with allusion, deep in emotion, and sometimes giving you a little salty-mouth. A fantastic collection and not one to be missed.”

—
JOHN HORNOR JACOBS
, author of
This Dark Earth

“Molly Tanzer’s
A Pretty Mouth
is a spectacular book, rad and weird and fun. With winks to P. G. Wodehouse, Robert E. Howard and the Cthulhu Mythos of H. P. Lovecraft, it showcases the work of a woman who delights in writing. She writes very well indeed! This is a book I will return to, for to read it is such a naughty pleasure.”

—
W. H. PUGMIRE
, author of
The Twisted Muse

“I am a bit bashful about being titillated by Molly Tanzer’s naughty debut, A PRETTY MOUTH, but I must admit it in order to write this blurb. While having segments that are hot and sexy, it is also a dark and disturbing tale with a wicked sense of humor and compelling chracaters. I blush just thinking about it and might have to go read it again!”

—
ALAN M. CLARK
, author of
A Parliament of Crows
and
Of Thimble and Threat: The Life of a Ripper Victim

“It’s been repeatedly said we’re enjoying in a new golden age of weird and fantastic fiction. We are, and this lady is one the gifted magicians whose literary creations are keeping the bonfire burning brightly!”

—
JOSEPH S. PULVER, SR
., author of
The Orphan Palace

“Tanzer lifts the skirts of Victorian hypocrisy for a full Monty view of perverted hijinks and fun.”

—
MARIO ACEVEDO,
author of
Werewolf Smackdown

A PRETTY MOUTH

Molly Tanzer

Lazy Fascist Press

Portland, Oregon

A LAZY FASCIST ORIGINAL

Lazy Fascist Press

an imprint of Eraserhead Press

205 NE Bryant Street

Portland, Oregon 97211

www.lazyfascistpress.com

www.bizarrocentral.com

ISBN: 978-1-62105-050-6

A Pretty Mouth copyright ©2012 by Molly Tanzer

Cover art copyright ©2012 by Matthew Revert

www.matthewrevert.com

“The Infernal History of the Ivybridge Twins” first appeared in Historical Lovecraft and The Book of Cthulhu, “The Hour of the Tortoise” first appeared in The Book of Cthulhu 2.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law.All persons in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance that may seem to exist to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental or for purposes of satire or parody. This is a work of fiction.

“The provision, then, which we have here made is no other than
Human Nature
. Nor do I fear that my sensible reader, though most luxurious in his taste, will start, cavil, or be offended, because I have named but one article. The tortoise—as the alderman of Bristol, well learned in eating, knows by much experience—besides the delicious calipash and calipee, contains many different kinds of food; nor can the learned reader be ignorant, that in human nature, though here collected under one general name, is such prodigious variety, that a cook will have sooner gone through all the several species of animal and vegetable food in the world, than an author will be able to exhaust so extensive a subject …”

—Henry Fielding, from
Tom Jones

A Spotted Trouble At Dolor-on-the-Downs

Though I am certain my fellow members of the Junior Ganymede Club for Gentlemen’s Personal Gentlemen are well aware of the pleasures concomitant with our profession, it is, I believe, still worth noting that there are several substantial risks when one’s chosen profession is that of valet, especially when contrasted with butling. Butlers serve households, and households, being inanimate entities, are therefore neither whimsical nor capricious; nor, as is perhaps more relevant to my point, are they able to lose wagers so spectacularly that it necessitates the loaning out of their employees to settle their debts.

Perhaps I stretch my metaphor too far; then again, perhaps not. I would do well at this juncture to cease speaking in generalities, and note that I am in fact referring to a recent, and specific incident.

Since the Junior Ganymede’s rules specify that “every member must promptly, accurately, and unflinchingly record any compromising or embarrassing information about his employer in the Club Book,” I should confess straightaway that the antecedent to my taking up the pen this afternoon was another instance of my employer’s regrettable inability to successfully win a bet. One might think that a gentleman so well-known to himself and to others as particularly possessed of poor luck—or, if I might be forgiven for saying it,
insight
—would cease to gamble, but then again, one of Mr. Wooster’s most endearing characteristics is his eternal optimism, and, it must be said, perpetual unwillingness to heed the Socratic advice “
gnothi seauton
.”

This particular loss was keenly felt by him I am sure, but, unusually, it affected me, as his failure brought about my temporarily leaving his service and remaining at a seedy seaside resort at Dolor-on-the-Downs in the service of a frightful heiress and her notorious brother, and participating in certain events so scandalous an account of them could, for a considerable time after the conclusion of the affair, be found in all the major papers, though those accounts were not at all complete. Therefore, perhaps my earlier analogy is an apt one.

***

The troubling incident to which I refer happened some weeks back, during Mr. Wooster’s annual mid-summer seaside holidaying. This year was unusually vexing during the planning portions of the sojourn, for Mr. Wooster’s formidable aunt, Mrs. Agatha Gregson, requested—which in her case means
required of him
—that he join her at Dolor-on-the-Downs, in the south.

Truth be told, my employer did not much want to attend Mrs. Gregson during his seaside holidaying, Dolor-on-the-Downs not being his usual haunt and Mrs. Gregson being the sort of lady who enjoys match-making and whist more than bracing sea air, but she impressed upon him that it was important to her. After the fifteenth telegram in three days demanding his presence, and the nigh-constant arrivals of mail-order holidaying necessities such as umbrellas, bathing costumes, and straw hats in both his and my sizes, he realized that to go down for a week or so would be far less of an inconvenience than continuing to refuse.

Dolor-on-the-Downs is, like so many seaside towns, a place of distinct seediness. There was one street of hotels acceptable for human habitation, and the rest of the place was a hotch-potch of inferior lodgings, taffy shops, ice cream parlors, boardwalks, performers busking on streetcorners, teashops where the very windows bore a light sheen of grease, and, of course, public houses. During the season, children with sticky faces and sunburns run hither and yon without heed for the eardrums of others, and the beaches are clogged with their adoring parents, also sunburned, but less often sticky-faced.

The hotel where we were to attend Mrs. Gregson was one of the acceptable ones, though barely. The Marine Vivarium, as the place was called, tended toward the ostentatious rather than the tastefully luxurious. It was once owned and managed by a man of Continental extraction, Mr. Gabriel Prideaux, who had a passion for aquariums; after he died, his daughter, a Miss Cirrina Prideaux, took over management—as well as her father’s life’s work: Collecting rare and unusual aquatic specimens for the greater glory of the hotel. Thus, everywhere one looked there were aquaria—some large, some small, some salt, some fresh, all lined with stones and filled with colorful, ornamental creatures and underwater plants. There were big square aquaria full of native sea-beasts (as Milton might call them) set about on pedestal tables and sideboards, there were vase-shaped ones containing Asian specimens that adorned shelves and sinks; in the hotel’s restaurant there was even one entire wall that was an aquarium, full of fish one could, if one so chose, select and then consume. The memory of such a frightful gimmick in an establishment of alleged good reputation still troubles me.