If Nothing Else, Eve, We've Enjoyed the Fruit by Elaine Pascale Book Tour and Giveaway :)
If
Nothing Else, Eve, We've Enjoyed the Fruit
by
Elaine Pascale
Genre:
Horror
What
happens when a kept woman refuses to take her ridatemp and begins
thinking for herself? In If Nothing Else, Eve, We've Enjoyed the
Fruit; she begins talking to bunches of grapes and cantaloupe that
convince her to commit murder. Through her visitations with fruit,
the woman learns that a gender war can be reversed by traveling back
in time and eradicating the Tree of Knowledge and its villainous
apples. The fruit persuade her by telling her four other stories:
Boys
Will be Boys: A
spa is turned into a concentration camp: just don't ride the
elevators!
Ripped
to Shreds:
Pregnant Jody Burkhoff's body is changing rapidly, but not as quickly
as the lupine metamorphosis of her husband. First the neighborhood
animals are mutilated, then the neighbors are viciously murdered.
Which proves to be more dangerous, a monstrous creature or a hormonal
woman?
O:
Khaki Barlow enters a pageant in which only one woman survives. She
must complete tasks that are both mentally and physically daunting,
all while trying to learn the meaning of the words left by the
eliminated: I am here. Does she face incredible fears? Does a
one-legged duck swim in a circle?
The
Prison of a Man:
Told as an ethnographical project, Lara Thomas researches the deaths
of shoppers at a mall embedded in a small town, and encounters the
legendary Goat Man.
If
Nothing Else (Prologue):
Readers learn the final decision in the gender war.
Let’s
begin by telling the truth. Truth is different from belief: it
is meatier, it has more bite. There is no delight like being proven
correct in one’s belief, and no conundrum quite like being proven
wrong. Ask any college professor who has been put on the spot by some
arrogant post-teen. Ask any researcher who has forsaken friends,
family, and faith for decades, all for an elusive hypothesis. People
feel one way about beliefs, mothers feel the opposite. Mothers want
the deep-rooted fears that gnaw at them with the bite of a St.
Bernard to be refuted. These are the fears and superstitions that
they believe about their children, dread that seems so inevitable
that an entire life plays out like déjà vu. Mothers know things
before they know them. Call it intuition, call it perception, call it
anything but true. The
desire to be proven wrong, the desire to slip into denial, can be
powerful stuff. And when belief becomes truth, that is when the gates
of Hell swing open widely. The
truth is: Jody Burkoff’s husband had begun to change.
Elaine
Pascale has been writing for most of her life. She took a break from
fiction in order to give birth to two children and complete a
doctoral dissertation. She lives on Cape Cod, MA, with her husband,
son and daughter. She teaches a variety of courses at a private
university in Boston: from English Composition and Communications to
a Vampire Seminar. Her writing has been published in Allegory
Magazine, Dark Fire Magazine, and several anthologies. She is the
author of If Nothing Else, Eve, We've Enjoyed the Fruit, and is also
the author of the nonfiction book: Metamorphosis: Identity Outcomes
in International Student Adaptation--A Grounded Theory Study. She
enjoys a robust full moon, chocolate, and collecting cats.
Dystopia and Eve
The final girl is the last character
left alive to confront the killer. As a fan of any and all final
girls, I find it interesting that If Nothing Else, Eve, We’ve
Enjoyed the Fruit does not contain that trope.
…Eve… was
written many moons ago and my focus and my issues were quite
different. It is much more dystopian than if I were to write it now.
There is a running theme of loss of agency, with the women
representing facets of relationships: the lover, the mother, the
friend, the fighter. While I tend to argue that my stories do not
contain autobiographical information (let’s hope not: my real life
would not welcome horror in the same way my imaginary life does),
perhaps the stories in …Eve… were a way of tinkering with
adult womanhood. They may have been a playground for figuring out
where my version of being a woman fit in, or where I wanted to fit
in. In that sense, as well as in the sense of what the prologue
means, the characters were commencement girls and not final girls.
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