Lilli Carré

I rarely have bad dreams, but when I do it usually revolves around being unprepared or being in an insane time crunch. I might be packing a suitcase and I can't find a piece of clothing. I get stuck in a kind of time loop, frantically digging around drawers and turning up nothing. Meanwhile, the cab is waiting outside or I can see a giant clock or maybe I can see the plane from an airport lounge about to take off without me. I don't know what Freud would say but I can imagine this kind of dream sequence squeezed inside the pages of Heads or Tails.

Heads or Tails by Lilli Carré is an odd collection of short stories that visually strike a light, whimsical tone but are deceptively dark, even bordering on gothic. There is a streak of breathy melancholy in the surreal snippets created by Carré that reminded me of something from a Marc Chagall painting.

Dreams are often thought of as illogical but despite their bizarre topsy-turvyness, there's always an emotional rationale, right? Dream logic. Lilli Carré's stories blur that line between the mundane of waking life and the weird of some alternate reality of that waking life. In "Wishy Washy," a smug art critic who judges flower arrangements for a living wakes up one day and finds he has lost his ability to judge. That one was profound. In "The Thing About Madeleine," a woman encounters her double sleeping in her bed. She lets this other woman take over her life and enjoys watching a 'better' version of herself: “… like watching a movie with the sound turned low.” In "The Flip," a woman tosses a coin…and waits and waits. When the coin never reappears, she is stuck, frozen in her decision-making. The most complex story in the collection is "The Carnival," told in 32 pages, about a man (kind of like the woman in the doppelganger story) who goes through life feeling dull and miserable, and then suddenly wakes up in a kind of alternate world--he is awakened. "The Carnival" ends with ambiguity that makes sense on some dream logic level.

Carré's artwork is quite elegant, if quirky and twee. But what makes it special is how each panel is suffused with those sly, surreal twists and subconscious desires. Kinda cool, kinda creepy. It's creepy for the outward fact that it's not trying to be creepy. It's unsettling for its utter nonchalance. At one point a character happens to start levitating into the air. She says, "These hot winds…what a bother. I suppose I could give in just for a minute or two...." As one critic on NPR put it: "The whole collection has the feel of a dream in which remembering how to fly is as simple as forgetting that you can't."… (meer)