SOURCE: "Beauty as the Beast," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, February 7, 1988, p. 9.

In the following review, Hinerfeld faults Martin's sensationalist writing technique and the serious tone of the short stories found in The Consolation of Nature.

The Consolation of Nature is a title ironically meant. (It is also cleverly wrought, to sound authentically Romantic.) The principal subject of these freakish short stories is the fatal relation between people and animals. It's nightmare stuff: The rat scrambling in a child's long hair; the mermaid with her prize of fisherman's testicles; the dead cat, head trapped in a salmon can; the mice fed casually to the snake; the vicious dog, put to death. No consolation here.

We wince and turn away; Valerie Martin keeps on staring. Her fascination with the bloody and bizarre is itself fascinating. The genre is neo-Gothic hyperbole of the New Orleans School.

This is the...