I deliberately didn’t read Kelli Scott Kelley’s Accalia and the Swamp Monster before I was ready to write about it. Usually I read the books I review a week or more before I write so I have time to ruminate and digest them a little, but the elegant and strange paintings I saw during a quick flip-through made me wait. Accalia is as much or more a picture book than a text, and I wanted my thoughts on this delicately painted wonderland to be fresh when I put them on the page.
Accalia and the Swamp Monster is a fable, a slightly modernized fairy tale that feels as old and venerable as its more ancient counterparts. It’s “anyplace” setting feels an awful lot like Louisiana—there are no discrete locational markers, but the swampy surroundings and intertwined themes of sin, redemption, and filial honor will remind you of places just up the road.
The book opens with one of the most magical phrases possible in English, “Once upon a time,” and drops us into a fantasy world with no further ado: “Accalia … was dainty and pretty. However, in place of a young woman’s head, hers was that of a dog with two faces.” She and her sisters, conjoined twins who hide their fused lower bodies in a billowy dress, “took care of their sickly father, who was too weakened by regret to care for himself … . He stayed day and night under a table in a corner of the kitchen … .”
So far, this sounds like it could be the prelude to a Southern Gothic tale, a sort of Children’s Illustrated Faulkner. As magical as that would be, Accalia gets even better: “On top of the table lived their mother, a winged lioness … consumed by a ferocious heartache… .” One day, the mother-lioness becomes so angry that she bites off the father’s arms and flies away, and Accalia sets out on a quest to retrieve them.
Every page is or has an illustration. Kelley repurposed old cloth, little pieces of embroidered cotton or linen, to use as her canvases—the kind of small, objectively useless item that sits on an end table you pass sixteen times a day without noticing; and then one day you do notice it and remember a poor, sweet great-aunt you barely knew, who must have taken such care to embroider the edges. Kelley fills these poignant mementos with new life, populating them with escaped carnival animals, wild gator-ape hybrids, and the mythical, almost-real landscapes of Accalia’s world. The consistency given by the cloths lets Kelley play with style, moving from soft to vivid colors and realistic to dreamlike compositions as the events of the story warrant. There’s too much to absorb on first reading; the grace and fascination of the art require repeated exposures to sink in.
Kelley’s writing is clean but expressive, in the best fairy-tale style: you know exactly what she means, but there’s room to imagine. If I have one criticism, it’s that the work follows too closely the fairy tale convention of a happy ending—though I hardly wanted anyone to end up sad or broken, I longed to remain in this world where a woman with two dogs’ faces can be dainty and pretty and shapeshifters give useful advice. Accalia’s power comes from its open acceptance of a world in which the rules are different from our own; the nearer her world approaches ours, the less wonderful and believable it becomes.
Kelley was inspired by Jung, classical myths, and the psychology of fairy tales, and readers will recall these stories as they read her book. This was an added treat for me; now that I’ve been reminded of Grendel’s mother and the story of Osiris, I want to read Beowulf and the Egyptian myths again. While it’s not really a children’s book and while I enjoyed looking at it from an adult, analytical perspective, I find myself wishing I’d had the chance to read Accalia and the Swamp Monster when I was a child.
There was a place on my front porch that had been overtaken by honeysuckle, and I think, were I six again, I could easily believe it was a corner of the swamp ruled by the escaped carnival animals.
Details. Details. Details.
Accalia and the Swamp Monster
By Kelli Scott Kelley
50 color illustrations. 112 pages. LSU Press. $29.95.
Exhibit at the LSU Museum of Art
Accalia and the Swamp Monster: Works by Kelli Scott Kelley
August 22, 2014—January 25, 2015
100 Lafayette Street
Baton Rouge, La.
