The Stone Door by Leonora Carrington
A surreal, freaky little book filled with eggs, dolls, goats, blood-oaths, myth, folklore, and love.
The Stone Door by Leonora Carrington is an enigma in my mind. It’s this free-floating jumble of objects and words that can’t be pinned down in our reality. I guess “surreal” is the correct term.
The premise of this short novel is it’s a love story, between the White Child (who was an egg turned orphan boy (yes, you read that right), and a possessed doll who’s passed self is behind The Stone Door. The Stone Door separates Hungary and Mesopotamia. Mesopotamia houses the dead, including the doll. The White Child’s name is Zachariah, and we get most of his backstory where he’s at an orphanage in his early years, and has weird dreams. We encounter him again at a later age, where he’s determined to unlock The Stone Door to be with his love, the doll. Zachariah does unlock the door, and they live happily ever after. Or so I assume, the book ends once the door is unlocked so I can’t say for sure, but considering Leonora wrote this after happily marrying her second husband, I would be surprised if Zachariah and his possessed doll wife’s future was fraught with hardship. But you never know.
While this is marketed as a love story and at its base, that’s what it is, that’s not what stood out to me about this book. It was Carrington’s imagination, word choice, and phrasing. Our main girl encounters an egg, and is unsure how to make it move. Carrington writes,
“I then understood that the word to address such a primitive and embryonic body would have to come from a language buried at the back of time.”
The Stone Door, PG 26
What a sentence! Using a wind instrument of sorts, the egg starts to move and follows our main female character. Disturbingly, the egg produces an umbilical cord and wraps it around her neck, until the music becomes shrill and no longer rhythmic. The egg cracks and the umbilical cord shrivels, producing the White Child, Zachariah.
That’s just a taste of the weirdness of The Stone Door. In my opinion, the Egg story is the most grotesque, but be on the lookout for spiders, goats, blood-oaths, creepy dolls, giants, and more. This book is filled with myth and folklore, and you can really take your time to analyze all of the symbols and references if that’s your speed. On this particular read, I wasn’t interested in doing that because I was so enthralled with this book. I binged it in one day (which is unheard of for me) and felt enraptured with it. Thank you NYRB for publishing this freaky little book, I had the best time!
If you like “weird girl literature,” this is for you! If you prefer something more literal, and less disturbing, maybe skip this one. Also, would be a perfect spooky season book!