The Stain

Tetralogy of Elements #1

by Rikki Ducornet

The provocative, spellbinding debut novel, set in a village in the Loire Valley in the late 19th century, by prolific worldbuilder Rikki Ducornet. In The Stain , Rikki Ducornet tells the story of a young girl named Charlotte, branded with a furry birthmark in the shape of a dancing hare, regarded as the mark of Satan. "Sadistic nuns, scatology, butchered animals, monkish rapists, and Satan" ( Kirkus ), as well as the village exorcist, inhabit this bawdy tale of perversion, power, possession, and the rape of innocence. Ducornet weaves an intricate design of fantasy and reality, at once surreal, hilarious, and terrifying.

Genres: Fiction, Horror, Fantasy, Novels, American, 20th Century, Literature

226 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Rikki Ducornet (born Erika DeGre, April 19, 1943 in Canton, New York) is an American postmodernist, writer, poet, and artist.

Ducornet's father was a professor of sociology, and her mother hosted community-interest programs on radio and television. Ducornet grew up on the campus of Bard College in New York, earning a B.A. in Fine Arts from the same institution in 1964. While at Bard she met Robert Coover and Robert Kelly, two authors who shared Ducornet's fascination with metamorphosis and provided early models of how fiction might express this interest. In 1972 she moved to the Loire Valley in France with her then husband, Guy Ducornet. In 1988 she won a Bunting Institute fellowship at Radcliffe. In 1989 she moved back to North America after accepting a teaching position in the English Department at The University of Denver. In 2007, she replaced retired Dr. Ernest Gaines as Writer in Residence at the The University of Louisiana. In 2008, The American Academy of Arts and Letters conferred upon her one of the eight annual Academy Awards presented to writers.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rikki Ducornet is fanciful, avant-garde and graphic… Her satire is wicked, witty and gloomy…
Both religion and superstitions rule over the human minds… They are thoroughly intermingled…
Man and wife… The wife is heavily pregnant…

Not many months before, in the butcher’s shop, as the butcher pulled a slab of dead muscle from a hook, he had stood behind her, mesmerized by her rump. Like her crazy mother who had danced at Mass as naked as a worm, she had a fine body and she had red hair. He imagined the red flags beneath her arms, between her legs – that symmetry… To fuck a red-woman is to fuck a witch; she’ll have power over you ever after, she’ll suck the marrow from your bones, she’ll dismember you, throw your broken body to the wind, hang your heart from a tree for the crows to eat; he has no book-learning, but these things he knows. His own mother has warned him of red-woman.

The wife dies in childbirth… And a child is born evilly marked…

So Charlotte was born. Born with the creature’s image slapped to her face – a leaping hare, dusty plum in color, sprawled across her cheek, one paw scraping an eye and one her jaw. Covered with soft, velvety fur, it stood upon the flesh in relief.

Charlotte lives with her fanatically pious aunt… Due to her unusual birthmark she is expelled from school the very first day… So she spends her time at home…

Aunt Edma’s yard, like a medieval forest, afforded little pleasure and much to fear. The charming, furry rabbits, munching comfortably in their greenwire hutches, were lascivious creatures given over entirely to the dubious delights of fornication. It was impressed upon Charlotte that the rabbits were diseased, that at any moment their ears would fall off, that this malady was highly communicable. Charlotte, limping about painfully in tightly buttoned boots, must not go near the chickens either, for fear they fly into her face and peck out her eyes, mistaking them for grubs.

The girl is all alone and she lives in the world of her strange dreams… She naively aspires to become a saint… When she’s eleven she is sent to the nunnery where she is met warmly…

“Miserere nostri. It means ‘pity us.’ You will need God’s pity,” she roared, strutting before the row of prostrate figures and pushing Charlotte’s white face to the floor with her hand, “…you will need God’s pity, for I have none!”

Fanatics don’t want to wait for their afterlife so they attempt to establish the hell on earth.

[Warwick · Rating 4 out of 5]

This wonderfully strange and hormonal B-movie of a novel has the feel of an uncensored fairy-tale, and I mean that in the best possible way. It's pulsing with onanistic nuns and Satanic alchemists and hirsute dildo-salesmen; and yet the whole thing somehow also works as a dark metaphor for the experience of a girl on the cusp of adolescence, discovering, with the usual mixture of excitement and terror and awe, the mysteries of life, death, puberty, sexuality and religion. It reads something like an Angela Carter rewrite of Diderot's The Nun, and it should have been filmed by 80s-era Pedro Almodóvar.

The girl in question is Charlotte, whom we follow from birth to age 14 or so, sometime towards the end of the nineteenth-century in a rural hamlet in France's Loire Valley (at the time, the author was living in Le Puy-Notre-Dame). There is no great compelling story-arc: the action advances episodically through encounters of almost magisterial weirdness, in which wide-eyed naïf Charlotte grows up and tries to make sense of life as she is buffeted in turn by the various eccentric inhabitants of the village. The scenes and the characters are over-the-top, often ludicrous, but it's all very self-aware and witty, not to mention deliciously dark and extreme – it can be ridiculous but it's so much fun.

Ducornet's prose is a delight: lexically rich but also able to throw out passages of condensed wit – such as this thumbnail description of villagers during a flood:

In the villages of Louerre and Louresse, desperate families huddled together on rooftops and looked on helplessly as their livestock and an occasional arthritic ancestor drowned.

It takes both skill and humour to withhold the verb to the very end of the sentence there, and there are many similarly nimble phrases studded throughout the novel, going off like little depth-charges in your brain. Although you always feel that Ducornet's in control, it isn't what you'd call a restrained prose style: on the contrary, she's pretty much turned all the dials up to eleven throughout. Here's how we're introduced to Sister Malicia, the apotheosis of every nightmarish schoolteacher-nun that you've ever read about or encountered:

…a cadaverous creature as human as a broom handle, her arms knotted across her flat chest to protect the inverted nipples that dented the flesh like the cruel traces of tacks, her pale blue eyes lying loosely in their sockets like faded minerals in sagging boxes […she] carried her lovelessness with majesty.

Subtlety is clearly not the point here: Ducornet is having fun, fun, fun. Like an illustrated mediaeval manuscript, her narrative is booby-trapped with moments of unexpected obscenity or grotesquerie that jump at you out of nowhere.

Returning to his bed, the Devil's insinuations hot in his ears, he sinks his teeth into the palpitating sugar-plum of Dreamland, and straddling the corpulent finger of sleep, thrusting hard, fucks Time.

What's that all about? God knows, but there's a lot of sentences like that in here. I was grinning and scratching my head a lot – appreciatively. You have to admire the audacity of someone who can describe a nun's anus as her ‘rosy cyclopean nether eye’ – and how many other writers, searching for an adjective to describe the Virgin Mary's breasts, would plump for ‘quince-shaped’?! This is deft but this is also bonkers – a combination that I happen to love. Shall we have more quotes? Here's the village Exorcist contemplating his latest ritual:

But first the convent must be cleansed, the floors and walls washed with vinegar. He'll have to grease some snakes, salt the shit, tattoo a pregnant sow, fuck a three-horned cow, burn myrrh…

Although it sometimes seems like craziness for craziness's sake, you never stop feeling for poor Charlotte at the heart of the novel. The book is full of provocative symbolism and apparent magic – but like all proper fairy-tales, that's not what it's ultimately about. It's about learning to navigate the very real dangers and pleasures of reality. Behind the inventive and balls-deep insanity, in the end The Stain invites wiser, more grown-up readers to share one character's ‘intimate conviction that everything that is, is visible. That the universe is knowable, if only you dare look.’

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was my first Rikki Ducornet and it was well worth the effort; recommended by assorted GR friends (Scribble, Warwick and Lynne to name a few). It is set in rural late nineteenth century France in the area in which Ducornet lived. She has spoken about where the story came from; she spoke to a very old local woman who could remember the 1880s. She talked about the importance of birthmarks and encounters with the local wildlife led to the hare.
Hammer House of Horror meets Thomas Hardy meets rural superstitious Catholicism with a fair smattering of coming of age and lots of sexual shenanigans (well I did mention Catholicism – it goes with the territory). I mention Hardy because the rural characters who populate the book are so well drawn and reminded me of Hardy at his comic best in Under the Greenwood Tree. Another book this reminded me of was Precious Bane by Mary Webb (much underrated), which also deals with a facial birth defect and is set in the nineteenth century. You can also see Angela carter’s influence and there is a magical fairy tale quality about it all.
It is the story of Charlotte, who is brought up by her very “religious” aunt. Charlotte has a birth mark on her face in the shape of a hare. This is taken to be a sign of Satan. There’s a touch of the surreal about it with the wicked aunt, the uncle who talks to vegetables, the nuns (in turn, evil, sex starved/crazed and morbidly religious), colourful villagers, travelling salesmen (don’t ask about the wares) and not forgetting the Exorcist who can’t make up his mind whether to worship God or Satan.
It is a coming of age tale and a handbook on how not to bring up a child. Comic, over the top, scatological, but it has a strong sense of place (again reminiscent of Hardy); it is chaotic and extravagant and suffused with a warped religiosity. It’s shocking but great fun and I can just see Oliver Reed playing the Exorcist.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

The novel is Ducornet’s perfect form. She started out as an illustrator and artist, branching into writing children’s books and short stories in the seventies. All these are grist to her magical mill, but the novel pulls her talent for visually descriptive, poetic language and postmodern fables together, and the awards have been flowing ever since. This is her debut novel, lauded by her spiritual mother Angela Carter, and tells a typically manic tale of punitive spinsters, perverse exorcists, religious and mythical lore, seedy sexuality, and hare-shaped birthmarks. All set in early 20thC France, but equally at home in the Middle Ages. As a debut it bursts with a loopy energy, entangling itself in its many imaginative digressions, but the plot is held together by Charlotte, the abused girl at the heart of the piece. Her quest is never really obvious other than to escape her bitchhead auntie, but that seems as good a catalyst as any. Manipulative, manic, mental. This is a fitting read for my 100th Dalkey Archive book!

[Tony Vacation · Rating 4 out of 5]

During my two month hiatus from reviewing, I read through a slew of wonderful books that, unfortunately, I won't ever be getting around to reviewing. Two of these books were by the new love of my life, Rikki Ducornet. The first, The Fan-Maker's Inquisition, was a jaw-dropping foray into The Reign of Terror - those ten months of mass executions sandwiched within the ten years of the French Revolution - that told the heartbreaking story of a genuine and platonic friendship between the Marquis De Sade and a female fan-maker who specializes in erotic designs. The second, Netsuke, was a chilling yet sublime nightmare about a psychoanalyst who offsets his own self-loathing by sexually preying on his patients - until he sets in motion certain events that detonate his life of glass into an eruption of deeply disturbed psyches. In both cases Ducornet crafts swift and condensed novels that dazzle with pitch perfect sentences; dazzling narrative tricks; a panache for slithering between the erotic and the perverse; a vaudevillian command of voices; and, best of all, a bounding, tumbling, whirling love of language.

And her first novel, The Stain, is no different. While not as flawlessly crafted as her later, more mature works, this sexy first outing is a dark frenzy of a fairy tale that chronicles the trials and travails of young Charlotte, a turn-of-the-20th-century French waif born with a birthmark resembling a black rabbit tattooed alongside her face. This ominous "Mark of God or Devil" makes her the unwilling victim to the wants, fears and fetishes of a pitch-hearted aunt, a voluble Exorcist, a lustful Mother Superior, a machine-handed sadist of a nun, and even a werewolf. Ducornet shows her love for Rabelais with her zealous attention to feasts, farts, fornicating and theology, making this an often very bawdy and gutbusting read. This slim yet rewarding novel, with its dense wells of imagery that both delight and horrify, is a perfect place to plunge into the intoxicating witchery that is Rikki Ducornet's prose.

I want more now!

[Lynne King · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘ “I am …infatuated!” the Mother Superior admitted to the crucifix upon her return, her mind foggy with lust and self-loathing. “I am plagued with base longings of …voluptuous intent!” ’

Only Rikki Ducornet, in my opinion, could have achieved such a tour de force in her first literary work published in 1984. I believe that she is one of the most remarkable writers of the 20th and 21st centuries and second only to Lawrence Durrell, whose exquisite prose will last throughout time, as is still evident today. But she is such a multi-faceted individual and I did so enjoy the saucy and provocative side of her nature that is shown in this particular book.

I think, however, that I made a mistake in not reading this book first as this shows the beginning of her remarkable literary development. The style is so completely different to “Gazelle”, “The Fanmaker’s Inquisition” and “The Fountains of Neptune”. All such diverse subjects but still her multi-faceted works allow one to be exposed to the richness of her language. In fact to enter into the labyrinth of her mind, I can only equate to that of meeting the Minotaur in his own hidden and secret labyrinth. Her thoughts are a cornucopia of exotic delights, which also contain the unexpected elements of fear and even shock. And this book does shock me in parts as although it is sensual, many of the descriptions are also sexually explicit, and combined with religion and sorcery give it quite a sinister aspect. Yet regardless, innocence prevails throughout the perversion, savagery and debauchery; so in reality it’s a true dichotomy.

There is always a clue given that points the finger at a final outcome in every one of this author’s works – it is in many cases shown in the expressions in the eyes which result in their true meaning. And here, it is so true, as shown in the most remarkable denouement with Charlotte and the “villain”.

The arrival of Charlotte into the world is surrounded by hate, drunkenness and ferocity. Her mother, also called Charlotte, had been led such a merry dance by a man that she had found it impossible to escape from the hopeless position she was in, that of being pregnant and unmarried, which was a veritable crime in the 19th century. Plus there was the added humiliation of being cast out by her family, losing her name and her inheritance and all due to a wretched, admittedly very handsome, drunken butcher. The follies of women do indeed spring to mind. This birth also resulted in the death of her mother. Maybe with hindsight it was just as well because what sort of life would she have had?

It caused me in fact to wonder if the devil does in fact exist. I always feel distinctly uneasy whenever I see the number 666 as thoughts of the beast, devil and the Antichrist immediately spring to mind. In addition, what chance could Charlotte possibly have in life being born with “a leaping hare, dusty plum in colour, sprawled across her check, one paw scraping an eye and one her jaw. Covered with soft, velvety fur, it stood upon the flesh in relief.” At the time this was believed to be the mark of Satan.

There was only solution for her salvation and that was to call in the local exorcist. But this is no ordinary exorcist, who is supposed to be there to rid a body of demons and possession. Our exorcist has other interests that spread to areas outside his own particular sphere.

Having no mother, there is no choice but for Charlotte (who has changeling eyes according to Edma, which she despised) to go and live with her aunt Edma and her husband Emile. What a difference there is between this odd couple. Reference is made to Edma’s “gelid grasp” (a splendid word – far better than “icy cold”). This is a woman who “fights domestic and cosmic evils”, whereas Emile “does battle with the leek worms, slugs and snails,” and the like.

Poor Charlotte’s entry into school lasted “seven minutes”, as she had to put up with the taunts of the other children because of her birthmark. They shouted, “Evil Eye!” at her and so she was taught to read at home by Emile.

There is an extraordinary section where in desperation because of the “stain” Charlotte eats some broken glass but fortunately recovers, although it takes a while. But Edma decides enough is enough and she will have to go and that she will enter St.-Gemmes’ convent in September 1884, as a novice, one month before her eleventh birthday.

St.-Gemmes’ convent is run very strictly and sad events unfold there with one of the novices, Eulalie. Charlotte, who had initially been taken with the place, as she was looking for God, soon realises that there’s more to life than this. She misses the feckless Father Poupine (aka Archange), who whenever he’s paid spends it all on drink, enjoys himself and then waits for the next pay day. He’s unfortunate in that he loses his two ears. The first happens when Edma accuses him of stealing from her and he’s arrested. He spends one night in jail and his left ear is bitten off by a bat. I can imagine losing one ear but two? The second happens when he gets into a skirmish with a wolf, which rips Poupine’s ear off and then carries off his faithful dog Fleas. So the unfortunate priest goes back to La Folie where La Saignée takes care of him:

“So you’ve lost both your ears, and you’ve lost your dog, Archange? Have you lost your prick as well”. He moans. (Is this before I wonder or after La Saigneé’s inspection of his body?) She puts her hand down under the covers and feels around.”

Well, hmm, that was an interesting result.

Events also take a turn for the worst with Eulalie and also the arrival of the exorcist. That was not good news and soon he’s “spreading his wares” with the Mother Superior, other sisters and even novices in the Convent much to Sister Malicia’s fury, who rushes off to inform the Bishop. As for the Mother Superior, well she is certainly not what she appears to be! She indeed has hidden depths that are different from her Godly thoughts.

One part of the book, however, was so moving:

“It is in May she sees the golden hare once again. They are both startled, and as she leans above him, nearly swooning with excitement, he crouches in the wood-violets, evoking the treasure at the rainbow’s end – a mound of gold and cinnamon and snow – his obsidian (would this be fiery or hot looks?) eyes transporting her to a swifter, more triumphal star…. He casts a spell from which she will never entirely awaken, not even when the years will have carried her far from this time and place. And when at last he moves, it is with short, hesitant bounds, as if knotted to her heart by an invisible thread. The witchery is such that when, in an arc of fire, he is gone, she is still leaning…”.

This is a splendid and thought-provoking book by Rikki Ducornet who never ceases to surprise me. Although it is indeed a tantalising and spellbinding work, to date my favourite remains “Gazelle”. A frisson permeates throughout my body whenever I browse through that remarkable book. Still this book is an excellent starting point for those wishing to enter the magical world of this remarkable author. I highly recommend this book.

[Kris · Rating 4 out of 5]

This, the first novel in Ducornet's Tetralogy of the Elements, is earthy in more ways than one. Set in a village in the Loire Valley in the late 19th century, the novel boasts bawdy characters reminiscent of the figures in early modern folktales, but with a modern edge. The central character is Charlotte, a girl bearing a birthmark in the shape of a hare on her face. The shape is significant, as hares were associated with a host of derogatory qualities, from cowardice to sexuality, in medieval and early modern Europe, and Charlotte's mother conceived her before her marriage to Charlotte's drunkard father, and then died giving birth to her. Charlotte's aunt, Edma, views Charlotte as marked by her mother's sin -- but, as we soon realize, licentiousness is an endemic trait in the village, as seen in characters such as an Exorcist torn between God and demons, and a convent full of nuns taking their vows of chastity very lightly. Charlotte's uncle, Emile, represents another kind of earthiness, as he talks lovingly to his vegetables and teaches Charlotte to read using his seed catalogs. The novel works because of Ducornet's wholehearted embrace of her salacious characters, with exuberant prose and a willingness to go to extremes in her depictions of characters and situations.

[Ian "Marvin" Graye · Rating 4 out of 5]

Subversive Intelligence

This novel was first published by Grove Press in America and then by Chatto and Windus in the UK, at the encouragement of Angela Carter.

Carter loved its eccentricity and thought the English would embrace it. At the same time, Ducornet admired the subversive nature of Carter's intelligence. It's clear from the novel that they have this quality in common.

All the Best Words are Taken

You'll find much dualism within this fairy tale: light and dark, innocence and experience, life and death, good and evil, piety and hypocrisy, chastity and lust.

However, it's hard to describe its appeal without using some of the adjectives that appear on the cover: erotic, lewd, bawdy, ribald, impudent, wicked, demonic, Gothic, grotesque, outrageous, demented, riotous, lunatic, melodramatic, comic, touching.



A Seedling No Longer

Although it was her first novel, Ducornet writes with enormous perception and precision. Like a fairy tale, her story is composed so that it can be read or told more than once, each time revealing new pleasures, clues and secrets.

Not surprisingly for a fairy tale, it concerns female puberty and the loss of innocence.

One of Charlotte's benefactors says, "you're not a seedling no longer, but a full blown flower."

Only Charlotte doesn't yet appreciate what is happening to her, nor the floral metaphor:

"I'm not a female, I'm not a flower!"

A Dormant Volcano

In contrast, a male character observes Charlotte growing up, from a close range.

On the one hand, he portrays her as "precocious, pure, inspired". On the other, "tempestuous, quixotic...savage...a dormant volcano". These latter qualities are projections on a child, whom he calls a "changeling". They reflect the desire of a Sadeian adult male, waiting, wolf-like, to pounce on her when the occasion presents itself and the time is right.

Little respect for womanhood is implied. In a Rabelaisian moment (of which there are many), a male comments:

"Gas and ovulation are humankind's profoundest humiliations."

None of Your Churchy Crap

Charlotte is supposedly protected by the Church:

"She will be safe with you. Pearls must be kept from pigs."

Regrettably, the Church (metaphorically the real Stain in this novel, although literally it refers to Charlotte's furry hare-shaped birthmark) is just as complicit in the perils that face Charlotte as testosterone-driven men:

"Promise me you won't break my ears with none of your churchy crap!"

Pearls Poised Upon Swine

While the writing style is both visceral and economical, there are some wonderfully subtle (even unsubtle!) uses of language, some of which could easily pass you by if you weren't paying attention. You have to assume everything has some significance, otherwise it would have been omitted. For example, pearls recur in a different context in relation to one of the above swine:

"Embracing a branch, he clasps his wand, a pearl poised at its extremity. 'Pan spermia!' he whispers. 'Pan spermia!' he cries."

What Lunacy

Throughout the novel, Ducornet builds a feminist cosmology that eventually extended over a number of her subsequent works:

"First I take some earth and then some air and then water and: he, he! fire, plenty of fire!"

Elsewhere, Charlotte's benefactor entertains her with tales of "star jelly" and "moon-spit".

It's no surprise that the moon features in a story about puberty and menstruation.

Early on, Ducornet mentions the Aztec lunar deity or moon god, Tecciztecatl. It was fascinating to learn that the Aztec word for the moon is the word for both shell and womb.

The Stain Once Removed

Ducornet has created a myth, a spell, an enchantment about a young girl that moves "with short, hesitant bounds, as if knotted to her heart by an invisible thread" and enables her, most importantly, to arrive safely at her destination of womanhood.

It's equally rewarding for us to participate in the journey of "The Stain", even if we do so once removed.



SOUNDTRACK:

Siouxsie and the Banshees - "Christine" (The Strawberry Girl)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSSlx...

Pixies - "Monkey Gone To Heaven"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHC9H...

Pixies - "Debaser"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVyS9...

The Pixies - "Gigantic"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJncH...

[Cody · Rating 4 out of 5]

Can a person call a book ‘ribald’ without coming across as a total asshole? No? Oh well…

Poor Rikki Ducornet. You’ve suffered the unenviable fate of any book in the wake of RURD. Any failings are my own, your lovingly-fucked little fairy tale is an absolute delight to the senses. I’ve long held that more literature could benefit from toefucking (toe-->orifice, not toes fucking one another—that would just be absurd), and The Stain goes a long way to correcting this glaring authorial oversight. For that, I doff my feathered cap to you.

I was kind of surprised by the relatively low numbers this one has put up, as RD has been one of those names that I’ve heard for years. I just naturally assumed that she was huge. Then again, I naturally assumed that I invented the horseshoe (tennis shoe that goes on a horse), so that just shows you what assumption will get you. Brass tickity tacks: read this delightful little tome of ribaldry. It tickles you in all the right naughty bits, including that too-often overlooked erogenous zone called the intellect. Keep your peepers out for a quite disarming ending, one that engenders Ducornet all the more to me. I strongly urge you to add her considerable talents to your personal library; mine is now stuffed to overflowing with Ducornet goodies soon to be scarfed.

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Opens at a fever pitch, a pastoral frenzy of verdant growth and decay and pious hypocrisy bleeding into mythic occult in fin-de-siecle France. From there, things only become more manic, churning and disintegrating in ever-quicker cycles until the second half unfolds almost in a single breathless torrent. What makes it work (and impressively so) is that Ducornet is actually able to maintain this frenzy with sustained narrative focus and baroque grotesque fairy tale image. I'd been not too sold on the Ducornet I'd read in the past, but even in its general hysteria, this has a much stronger sense of conviction and urgency. Also, I love the kind of moral uncertainty that this shares with some of Ducornet's surrealist fore-runners: it's clear what she disproves of, but in this anarchic jumble it's hard to extract what exactly is considered right, wrong, or just blindly necessary. In a pleasurable and compelling way. You'll see what I mean.

[George]

Ducornet’s magnificent debut concocts a dark and sardonic fable via the most mauve prose this side of Angela Carter. While tales of religious fanaticism can feel tired and weighed down by tropes, the characterization and zany storytelling energy, which put me in mind of Rushdie at the height of his powers, never let up. This novel is the first in a tetralogy of elements (of which I’ve read three thus far) and is arguably the best, which is saying quite a bit, considering how much I loved The Fountains of Neptune. The Stain is the delightfully abrasive cleanser of a mind made numb by minimalism and restraint in literature. I interviewed Ducornet some time ago here: https://thecollidescope.com/2020/08/3...
She also blurbed my own debut novel which, if nothing else, is a salve to know that a writer of this magnitude approves of my scribbles.

[Sebastien · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. What a phenomenal writer. Has the elements of a grotesque fairy tale, and so lovingly written. As I was reading the story, I kept thinking the writing and imagery are unbelievable, and the precision of language is ridiculously good. Poetic. Turns out Ducornet is also a poet (and an artist). Which makes perfect sense given her writing style, which is very visual, finely crafted, and precise.

The story is bizarro-world, taking place in 1880s rural France (I think 1880s). A fantastic mix of the profane, the arcane, and the sacrosanct. The "bad" characters are wonderfully hateable (like Dickens, Ducornet makes fabulously caricatured villains).

Charlotte is the protagonist, a young girl with a “stain,” a rabbit-like marking on her face. We see her adventures as she goes to a convent, along with her various friendships and experiences that culminate in a bloody finale. Hints of Red-Riding Hood, except way weirder, way more #$%#’d up. Coming of age story? Kinda? The sweet and the vicious are juxtaposed consistently throughout the story.

I love the creativity of the writing, the story was honestly quite good, bizarre and clever, but it’s the writing itself that stands out.

I laughed so hard at this phrase, never heard of someone’s bunghole referred to as a “cyclopean nether-eye.” Which tbh is a hilariously good description.

A few passages and quotes I enjoyed:

“Two months have passed and the winds of November howl around St.-Gemmes like packs of famished wolves, as in the forest the scattered beasts themselves, lean survivors of a happier epoch, ululate beneath the racing moon.”

“Her pain--cyclical in the early hours--grew constant towards night, a raging moon orbiting within her, a drumming heart bristling with thorns.”

“How many times throughout the long months of her convalescence has she seen the walls buckle and tear as the Mother of God swims into her room as quietly as an undulating jellyfish to show her the globe of the world in miniature, its lapis lazuli oceans and chalcedony continents spinning in the billowing folds of her mantle as upon clouds?”

“But as she stood impotent with fear, a match was struck from within the room, a kerosene lamp lit and a face bloomed forth like a moon in the darkness.”

“In a flash the train dissolved as with unutterable grace the hare vaulted and bounded alongside the tracks in electrifying leaps--arcs of raw energy crackling like hoops of fire as they struck the air.”

Can’t wait to read more of Ducornet’s work, this was my first book of hers.

Random observation.
Nacreous (def: mother of pearl color): Nabokov abuses the hell out of this word (as he does a lot of other French words which he jams into his writing). But it’s in reading Nabokov that I got tuned into how much certain writers with French knowledge weave French rooted words into their English. Ducornet only uses nacreous once at the end of the book, but she is obviously well-versed in French and French culture which can be noticed in some of her word choices.

[Michael Kuehn · Rating 5 out of 5]

My introduction to Ms Ducornet was THE FOUNTAINS OF NEPTUNE. Her name had suddenly become ubiquitous in the little corner of Goodreads.com I frequent, praised for her unique imagination and evocative prose. I don't even recall why I chose NEPTUNE as my entry to her work; the synopsis got my attention, I guess. And after that short volume I wanted more Ducornet, so I jumped to the start of her Tetralogy of Elements (comprised of:The Stain, Entering Fire, The Fountains of Neptune, The Jade Cabinet).

THE STAIN is something of an adult fairy tale, a dark, surreal tale of religion and wanton sin populated by a mad Exorcist, an evil auntie Edma, a lustful prioress of the House of Merciful Agony, a cruel Sister Malicia, superstitious bumpkins, werewolves, and a poor waif, Charlotte, marked at birth by either God or the Devil (take your pick) with a “stain,” “a leaping hare, dusty plum in color, sprawled across her cheek, one paw scraping an eye and one her jaw. Covered with soft, velvety fur, it stood upon the flesh in relief.” [12]

While it is Charlotte's story – is she victim or martyr? -- there are frequent digressions, brief and often enchanting, which further add to strangeness of the universe we're inhabiting here.

Most of the characters are grotesques, in the Southern Gothic sense, and I couldn't help but think of Flannery O'Connor's fiction, the novel WISE BLOOD comes to mind. Though their vocabularies differ, their fiction produces for me the same impressions, that of a universe just on the knife edge of disorder, a world I might perceive just out of the corner of my eye, a strangeness difficult to articulate.

The headline on the clipping said, EVANGELIST PROMISES TO BLIND SELF. The rest of it said that Asa Hawks, an evangelist of the Free Church of Christ, had promised to blind himself to justify his belief that Christ Jesus had redeemed him. It said that he would do it at a revival on Saturday night at eight o'clock, the fourth of October. The date on it was more than ten years before. Over the headline was a picture of Hawks, a scarless, straight-mouthed man of about thirty, with one eye a little smaller and rounder than the other. The mouth had a look that might have been either holy or calculating, but there was a wildness in the eyes that suggested terror. [Wise Blood, 106]

Sister Malicia --- a cadaverous creature as human as a broom handle, her arms knotted across her flat chest to protect the inverted nipples that dented the flesh like the cruel traces of tacks, her pale blue eyes lying loosely in their sockets like faded minerals in sagging boxes – carried her lovelessness with majesty. [The Stain, 124]

Ms Ducornet's prose is a delicious sensory overload: Edma pushed the door open, and to the sound of a jingling bell Charlotte's nostrils were assailed by cow and goat cheese, pork and beef sausage, honeycomb, lavender, mildew, starch and cat piss. [81]

In that ferocious wind the mushrooms – green, bronze, suppurating yellow, orange, black, deadly purple and red – had magically proliferated and all about him fetal knobs and thumbs gleamed phosphorescent and menacing. As he stooped to consider a runny fungus oozing from the mossy crotch of a hideously ancient tree, the sky ripped apart at its southern seams and hail, maturing in minutes from the size of peas to that of turkey eggs, plummeted to earth. [176]

Her prose is a delight, surprises to be found around every line, every paragraph – the reader anticipates a word or phrase about to appear and with a linguistic flourish she turns a new phrase, a fresh word image. I look forward to more Ducornet.

[Ian Scuffling · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Gothic fairy tale of a story, Rikki Ducornet's The Stain is a novel of five senses that tickles and taunts, utilizes familiar images and motifs to reimage the bildungsroman. Visually alluring, full of the darkest and most sordid elements of the grimoire and the Grimm (the real shit, not that sandblasted Disnified crap), the novel focuses on the curious birth of a little girl with a furry "dancing hare" shaped birthmark on her face. Her aunt and uncle take custody when the young Charlotte's mother dies in childbirth.

What follows is a tale of Charlotte's coming into her own—of the life of a little girl branded with such a present disfigurement, of being an outcast, of being a sexual object, of religion. The book also contains exorcists, wolves, menhirs, nuns. It's a little like if Little Red Riding Hood had been transformed into a story abut a little girl's puberty and preoccupation with religious signs.

When Ducornet is on, she's lightning. The prose cuts to your quick and is stunning and evocative. But this book shifts like sands, never finding the stable ground it needs to tell its tale. Some of the coming-of-age stuff doesn't really develop until the last third, where there's a kind of sudden shift in the narrative. The middle third is obfuscatory but is preoccupied with religion and sex—neither of which are really deep abiding interests for me in fiction.

Don't let the three stars fool you; just because it didn't wow doesn't mean I will be abandoning Ducornet—I'm eager to see what else she has up her sleeve, especially as she hones her craft in later works. Looking forward to seeing some more of her high-strangeness.

[Jim · Rating 2 out of 5]

The opening chapter is an amazing piece of writing. A five star effort.

Unfortunately, the rest of the novel is uneven, underdeveloped, and often undercooked. She pulls out a few too many Chekhovian guns without firing a shot, which ends up diluting the main thread. She does pull out one Chekhovian knife, and goes to the hearts of the issue, but even that felt rushed and underdeveloped.

The writing is at times beautiful and inspiring, but the book loses its flow too often. I will, however, try another of her books, because when she's on, she's marvelous.

[Chris Via]

A rollicking black satire on the Catholic obsession with sin, set forth in a jubilation of language. Looking forward to continuing the tetralogy.

[Δημήτριος Καραγιάννης · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ludicrous, heavily sexual and hedonistic. Personally, i found this book to be the least entertaining Ducornet novel I have read thus far, but it still has a lot of merit. Lascivious nuns, child-saints and a depraved Exorcist-scientist of the black arts will make up for an interesting read.

[Amber · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ve adore all else I’ve read by this author, but the prose in this novel tumbled too often into the absurd for me to form any lasting relationship with the characters until towards the final 30 pages or so.

[Autumn Christian · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fucked up fairytale about a girl marked with a birthmark on her face, 'the stain', the emblem of her mother and father's sin. Religion and sex and growing up, all enfolded in beautiful language and harmonious insanity.

[Michael Markowitz · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Stain is a tricky book—to read, describe, or even review. It kicks off with elements that'll pervade the novel: religion, sexuality, brutality, all of which bring young Charlotte into the world. She's born under horrible circumstances, and burdened with a mysterious, possibly Satanic, birthmark on her face—perhaps her own unearned, unremovable Scarlet Letter or albatross around her neck?

But this isn’t a traditional morality tale. From the start, the narrative resists clarity. Scenes and conversations feel disjointed. Characters often speak past one another in their own vernaculars, and at times it’s unclear who's even speaking or acting, which may be something lost in translation from the original French or may be entirely by design.

There's Uncle Emile who's one of the more sympathetic characters, who replaces reality with gardening and suffers from a terrible stutter. There's an Exorcist who's a lustful charlatan who may be actually summoning demons rather than trying to dispel them, all while spewing religious mumbo-jumbo... much like the corruptible Mother Superior and other sadistic nuns. The Téton Twins, born the same day as Charlotte, drift through the novel speaking only to each other in their private language. And Charlotte herself, emotionally stunted by abuse, also struggles to articulate after eating glass.

And like those shards on her tongue, I'm only scratching the surface on what's outlandish about this book. Each character and event is more shocking, depraved, cruel and disgusting than the next. At times the narrative borders on magical realism, with biblical storms, a pack of vicious wolves, a student at a nunnery seeming to float in the air and then disappearing, or did she? Rather than try to parse out some kind of symbolism or make sense of it all, it's more palatable to just let this absurdism play out in its utterly disturbing way.

I wonder if this book had influenced Ottessa Moshfegh's Lapvona, which also plays with medieval grotesquerie and religious absurdity. That novel is set in an unnamed Eastern European fiefdom; The Stain takes place in late 1800s France, but aside from the presence of trains and a bicycle, it feels just as medieval. The vagueness of the setting adds to the book’s surreal obscurity.

There seems to be some redemption for the kinder townfolk and Charlotte herself, but I think trying to find a moral in this book is as futile as trying to remove Charlotte's stain. Better to accept the blemishes for their bizarre beauty.

[Abby Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

“dear mother, marked by evil since birth, i have lived in honor of life and dream only of salvation”

this one is for girlies with deep rooted religious trauma!!!

[rayan · Rating 3 out of 5]

the writing was really nice and rich i liked the gothic tone and the setting felt cold and quiet it made everything feel like a long dark dream.

the story was strange and disturbing at times like some parts made me uncomfortable but i kept reading it had a weird pull especially the way the the way it’s written it felt raw and cursed.

i just wish charlotte had more to her like she was interesting but flat sometimes i wanted more shifts in her arc or inner world not just the silence.

3.5/5

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

So far, so strange... very strange, but in a good way...a magical realism fairy tale. If there is such a thing as a good bad dream, this is one... there is beauty in the ugliness. I love the writing, the images are powerful, disturbing, funny, pitiful, and surreal. Even when I cringe and think to myself, "That's a bit over the top...but it works..." I can't help it, I really love this book!

[emy ུ⃛ ❤︎ · Rating 3 out of 5]

i reached for this book after seeing the dedication to the enchanting feminist writer angela carter. i think most fans of carter’s works will devour this story.

“the stain” reads like an episodic (and chaotic) fairy-tale. the writing was most certainly grotesque and bewitching, and filled with a sort of wicked humor. the writing saved this for me, as the story did not captivate me all that much.

[Ellie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this ferociously. Could not put it down. A deliciously perverse, humorous, and surreal exploration of power, religiosity, and innocence. Honestly, can't stop thinking about this weird 19th century French village and the cast of characters in it

[Alicia · Rating 5 out of 5]

How could I give it anything but five stars?

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A child is born with a "stain" in the form of a furry birthmark in the shape of a hare. Her mother dies during childbirth, and this mark is believed to reveal Charlotte as belonging to the realm of evil. She is raised by her awful aunt and her stuttering, simple, but kind uncle. When she nearly reaches puberty, she is sent away to a convent where she endures more suffering. There are plenty of seemingly spiritual things that happen, including a couple potential possessions, but the Exorcist is perhaps nothing but a lecher. A bleak fairy tale.

[tromboy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel stands as one of my favourite books in the realm of G R O T E S Q U E
Its closest relatives are a group of mischievous and malicious books, books which don't know each other: Dunn's Geek Love, Barry's Cruddy and Venturini's Las primas. A dark coming-of-age story mixed with a comic undertone about a girl with deformations opened for the world to read.

Charlotte, Olympia, Roberta and Yuna.
Charlotte, Olympia, Roberta and Yuna.
Charlotte, Olympia, Roberta and Yuna.

The exorcism escene: I HAVE NO SPEECH.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Stain is mix of magic realism, gothic novel, and fairy tale with terrifying and tantalizing images, bizarre events, and a weird caste.

[Alex Sarll]

Earthly, profane, surreal...you can see why this has jacket praise from Angela Carter. In a weird way it feels more like her short stories than her own novels do.