This book in insidious. It didn't feel like much when I finished it, but its stories have been rotting in my brain. Like a holy book dissolving into nectar and pulp in your hands, so do these stories grow glittering mold in your brain. I can't stop thinking about blemmye anatomy and multicolored lions and fog so thick you have to dig through it and how awesome and awful is a tree sprouting the head of St. Thomas on a snowy mountainside and seas made of sand and what feeding on sounds feels like and the bittersweet joys of cannibalism.

Catherynne Valente floors me to be honest, she has one of the richest most imaginative minds of any writer I've come across. This book is not as lyrically rich as some of her others, but the world she has created (or rather, fleshed out from medieval myth) is achingly entrancing, full of beauty and melancholy. Dirge is an appropriate name for these tales - there is a deep sadness to behold here. Particularly the grief of loss: lost lovers, lost memories, lost families and friends, lost stories, lost homelands, and lost beliefs.

I will add that this book is very much an opening act. It was hard to get through sometimes because there is not much in terms of momentum and it's very unclear where the story is even going. Nonetheless, the book is true to its premise as a series of insanely tantalizing remnants of a larger story. The beauty of this book is the unknowing, the mystery - the gaps in the stories as sometimes the most entrancing parts. The blessing is that we were lucky enough to get even a small glimpse.