When 23-year-old Corey Cordele graduates from the Theatre Conservatory in Dallas, her advisor, award-winning playwright Maxine Due, buys her dinner to celebrate. Now that she\u2019s no longer Max\u2019s student, Corey assumes they\u2019ll be friends and that Max will use her status as \u201cone of the few living main characters in the American theatre\u201d to help launch Corey\u2019s career. Instead, Max reveals that she will be leaving Texas because another former student, Daniel Cho, has offered her a playwriting residency at the Chicago theater where he\u2019s artistic director. When Max doesn\u2019t offer to take Corey with her, Corey lashes out, calling Max a \u201ctwo-faced snake.\u201d Max expresses disappointment in Corey, saying, \u201cMiddle-aged women need opportunities, too. It\u2019s not all about you.\u201d Enraged, Corey flees the restaurant and starts running, stopping only when she feels the pull of French clairvoyant M\u00e9lusine\u2019s strip mall storefront. After surveying the shop\u2019s menu of services, Corey strikes a deal with M\u00e9lusine to place a curse on Max. Feeling empowered, Corey then reaches out to Daniel Cho and\u2014unbeknownst to Max\u2014finagles a deal identical to her teacher\u2019s, complete with a bedroom in the apartment where Max will be staying. Months later, when the women reunite in Chicago, it\u2019s clear to Corey that M\u00e9lusine\u2019s dark magic is working: Max\u2019s mood is manic, her health is deteriorating, and her self-confidence is gone. Corey is unwilling to leave anything to chance, however, and embarks on a campaign to gaslight the woman into madness. This inventive novel adopts the structure of a three-act, two-interlude play, complete with dialogue blocks, stage directions, and scene breaks, but also incorporates swaths of fever dream\u2013like exposition rendered in technicolor prose. Macon Fleischer may not exactly earn Corey\u2019s blind vengeance, but as Corey herself observes, \u201cplaygoers [are] more willing to take a story at face value,\u201d and that\u2019s what readers become as the story progresses.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When 23-year-old Corey Cordele graduates from the Theatre Conservatory in Dallas, her advisor, award-winning playwright Maxine Due, buys her dinner to celebrate. Now that she\u2019s no longer Max\u2019s student, Corey assumes they\u2019ll be friends and that Max will use her status as \u201cone of the few living main characters in the American theatre\u201d to help […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":4549,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4548"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4548"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4548\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}