SOURCE: Mars-Jones, Adam. “Running through the Recipes.” Times Literary Supplement (21 August 1987): 897.

In the following review, Mars-Jones offers a mixed assessment of the stories in Dreams of Dead Women's Handbags, asserting that Mackay's “faults are intermittent, her virtues—her eye, her inventiveness—constant.”

Moving as it does from the sombre to the absurdly trivial without becoming unambiguously comic, the splendid title of Shena Mackay's new collection [Dreams of Dead Women's Handbags] well represents the tonal range of the book. Sometimes she invokes the simplicities of melodrama or pathos, sometimes she transforms them at the last moment into some more sophisticated compound.

The title story is unusual in falling off from the eerie confidence of its opening: “It was a black evening bag sequined with salt. … This image, the wreckage of a dream beached on the morning, would not float away; as empty as an open shell, the black bivalve...