![]() ![]() These hallucinations begin for Alicia, then called Alice, at age twelve and ‘the onset of menses’, and the nightmare variety act continues until her suicide on Christmas Day 1972, in the woods outside Stella Maris, the Wisconsin psychiatric clinic where she has been a patient for two months. ![]() Among his retinue are an old toothless man who seems to be Alicia’s great-grandfather a pair of dwarves an old woman smeared with rouge a couple of blackface minstrels in overalls, straw hats and ‘enormous yellow shoes’ a diminutive boxer and a ventriloquist’s dummy. ‘He looked like he’d been brought into the world with icetongs,’ McCarthy writes, the implication being that no one would want to touch him. He’s a bit over three feet tall (Alicia measured this by comparing their shadows), has a bald and scarred head and flippers for hands. The leader of these phantoms is called the Thalidomide Kid. ‘I have clandestine conversations with supposedly nonexistent personages,’ Alicia Western tells her psychiatrist in Stella Maris, the second of two novels by Cormac McCarthy published this autumn. ![]()
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