A. S. Byatt's The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye: five fairy stories overflows with magical metaphorical mysteries. It's a delight to read, like Lewis Carroll, like Peter Beagle, like Richard Adams, like (early) Salman Rushdie. From the title novella, an example:

... She took it out of its wrappings — it was really very dusty, almost clay-encrusted — and carried it into the bathroom, where she turned on the mixer-tap in the basin, made the water warm, blood-heat, and held the bottle under the jet, turning it round and round. The glass became blue, threaded with opaque white canes, cobalt-blue, darkly bright, gleaming and wonderful. She turned it and turned it, rubbing the tenacious dust-spots with thumbs and fingers, and suddenly it gave a kind of warm leap in her hand, like a frog, like a still-beating heart in the hands of a surgeon. She gripped and clasped and steadied, and her own heart took a fierce, fast beat of apprehension, imagining blue glass splinters everywhere. But all that happened was that the stopper, with a faint glassy grinding, suddenly flew out of the neck of the flask and fell, tinkling but unbroken, into the basin. And out of the bottle in her hands came a swarming, an exhalation, a fast-moving dark stain which made a high-pitched buzzing sound and smelled of woodsmoke, of cinnamon, of sulphur, of something that might have been incense, of something that was not leather, but was? The dark cloud gathered and turned and flew in a great paisley or comma out of the bathroom. I am seeing things, thought Dr Perholt, following, and found she could not follow, for the bathroom door was blocked by what she slowly made out to be an enormous foot, a foot with five toes as high as she was, surmounted by yellow horny toenails, a foot encased in skin that was olive-coloured, laced with gold, like snakeskin, not scaly but somehow mailed. It was between transparent and solid. Gillian put out a hand. It was palpable, and very hot to the touch, not hot as a coal but considerably hotter than the water in which she had been washing the bottle. It was dry and slightly electric. A vein beat inside the ankle, a green-gold tube encasing an almost emerald liquid. ...

So rich in shocking, original, beautiful images! (And, unlike the recently read Hellbound Heart by Clive Barker, the naughty bits in Byatt's storytelling are lovely and loving, not crude or pervy.)

_{(cf Nimbus Halo Glory Aureole (2001-11-15), Oceans of Notions (2001-12-10), Ankh Micholi (2002-07-12), Last Unicorn (2007-05-18), Alice in Wonderland (2008-03-22), Winter's Tale (2014-10-24), Golem and Jinni (2016-06-10), ...) - ^z - 2023-12-19}