This is a sophisticatedly rendered, confident debut. She writes with a cold lyricism and each of the stories, whether one page or five, is well-paced and tightly controlled. Her work, with a nod to Georges Bataille, ties the literary, the bodily and the vulgar. Abby Kearney, The Skinny
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'Rachel Kendall's style reminds me at times of the Comte de Lautreamont yet it is starker and more mature. It also reminds me of Baudelaire in its challenge to the 'hypocrite lecteur'. This is not because she is derivative. Far from it, she has a unique voice. She has inherited and is innovating within these literary traditions. She involves the reader in a way that challenges the voyeurism of reading. She disturbs inbuilt bourgeois complacencies.' Richard Godwin, author of 'Apostle Rising'
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'There is something apocalyptic about the stories, something which elevates them to a higher level of awareness. I think it's their philosophical context that makes them deep and multilayered. Yes, the work is philosophical - first and foremost, philosophical. All metaphors, descriptions, scenes and characters are multi-layered owing to their existential orientation. Undeniably, all this was written by a woman-thinker, and it waits for a keen reader that could grasp what "can't be seen by our naked eye". V Ulea, Paraphilia Magazine
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'From Bourbon Street to Beasley Street: Poppy Z Brite quits New Orleans for Salford. Southern Gothic with a Northern twang' Nicholas Royle, author of 'Antwerp' and 'Mortality'.


'A Bataille vs Ballard mash-up.' Derek John


'Rachel Kendall's The Bride Stripped Bare, a collection of stories, is at turns appalling and wondrous, a repository of evil vignettes that aim for the dark heart of contemporary society. Kendall's stories - brief, often one-note short-shorts - are thin sketches structured with the rhythms of fairy tales, and colored with the hues of sex, violence, and a sort of deliberate, luxuriant perversity. These vignettes are nonetheless richly written; her prose a heady mixture of rococo extravagance and incisive minimalism.' Christopher Morris, Outsider Writers
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'Rachel Kendall's collection of visceral, nightmarish fairy tales is unified by a loose set of common themes: creation, transformation and mutation. The processes are frequently bloody, painful and result in something unwanted or disturbing, and written largely from the female point of view.' Maysa H, Xenith
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'I imagine the author of these stories composing these tiny, incisive works of fiction as if she were setting up one of those miniature theatres, made of paper, in which the characters are poked onto the stage to perform their predetermined roles. With the sweetest of smiles, Kendall will begin to make them suffer. Taking its title from a 1923 art work by Marcel Duchamp: 'The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even', this collection sets out to replicate Duchamp's project of depicting the erotic relationship between men and women. Kendall's perspective, however, is entirely of the 21st century. Although the stories are played out in the real world, this is life stripped of the comforting veneer of civilization.' Nick Jackson, The Future Fire
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'Rachel Kendall has stitched together a brutal corpus of horror in this collection that relentlessly chases you from one nightmare to the next until your brain is about to melt, then offers you a cigarette and tells you a joke, then pins you to the dirt (with real pins), removes your entrails and tells your future with them.' Brian Collier


'Like the films of Gaspar Noé, the images from these stories, once implanted in the mind, are quite impossible to reverse or erase. The versatile Kendall is here able, via carefully crafted language and dialogue, to make us feel at turns trapped, lonely, scared, angry, horny, disgusted. This is her gift, and it puts her in a class with writers such as Georges Bataille, William S. Burroughs, and Anaïs Nin, who were brave enough to go places that others were afraid to tread in their day. The 23 disturbing, yet often deceptively tender tales in this short but powerful collection speak to our most deeply felt desires and fears, and are well worth reading. As André Breton once said, "Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all." In The Bride Stripped Bare, it always is.' Marc Lowe, Neon Magazine
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