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In each of these eight lyrical and baroque tales, Melissa Pritchard transports readers into spine-tingling milieus that range from the astounding realm of Robert LeRoy Ripley's "odditoriums" to the courtyard where Edgar Allan Poe once played as a child. Whether she is setting the famed figures of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, including Annie Oakley and Sitting Bull, against the real, genocidal history of the American West, or contrasting the luxurious hotel where British writer Somerset Maugham stayed with the modern-day brothels of India, her stories illuminate the many ways history and architecture exert powerful forces upon human consciousness.
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Reviews
"Melissa Pritchard's aptly title The Odditorium considers the inner lives of the strange, the damaged and the forgotten…with its zest for the macabre and its time-spanning imaginative appetite…the singularity of her narrators remains indelible and shows that fiction still has the ability to shock and surprise."
Washington Post
"Pritchard takes risks, different risks in different stories. Can she write a segment in the form of a comedic Shakespearean dialogue? She can. Does a story evolve in epistolary form? It does. Will she be able to build a story around the format of an old newspaper feature? She will. Can she do it all with poetic, vivid prose? With one hand tied behind her back. Is Melissa Pritchard someone whose s
Los Angeles Times
"Pritchard's exuberant prose is perfectly suited to carry the antic freight of these often bizarre, always cerebral stories…The is a fulsome compendium of ripping good yarns."
Minneapolis Star Tribune