The Odditorium

February 20, 2012
Pritchard, author of Spirit Seizuresâfor which she won the Flannery O'Connor Awardâcertainly can't be accused of false advertising with her selected title for this collection of eight off-beat short stories that are likely to be an acquired taste. The order of the tales may work against her, as she starts with "Pelagia, Holy Fool," an account of a woman described as a "scoundrel-saint," who lived during the time of Tsar Alexander I, and who "flipped a convent full of pent-up, quarrelsome women on its head and put up with having her vile, unwashed feet kissed by a failing empire of wonder-struck pilgrims." That summary either grips, or doesn't, and for those in the latter category, much of the rest of the book is likely to be rough sledding. Only a handful, most notably, "Captain Brown and the Royal Victoria Hospital," the volume's standout, are traditionally-told stories; that entry, set in 1944 in a ghost-ridden southern England hospital designated to receive casualties after D-Day, is atmospheric, enigmatic, and moving.