The Pillow Friend

In "The Pillow Friend," Lisa Tuttle perfects what Stephen King achieves with great success in his early work; she crafts a disturbing tale of dreams that blurs one woman's reality and transforms all her desires into psychological nightmares that literally take on lives of their own. At one time, King knew how to expertly scare his readers to death. He delved deeply into the gray matter of imagination and unleashed a veritable plethora of everyday happenstances that as docile as they seemed grew a hydra's triple heads when analyzed by the mind's microscope of hesitant speculation. The clown in "It (Signet Books)," conscious and unconscious desires in "Needful Things: The Last Castle Rock Story," teenage angst in "Carrie"--these little in-sync intrusions spring from the subconscious like a bumper crop of intestinal parasites, worming their way into the mind's shadow place and broadening a thistle-infested path best forgotten. "The Pillow Friend" navigates with the same persistence; its main character, Agnes Grey, oscillates from one reality to another with such precision that the reader never quite knows whether or not the realm she describes is grounded in a real existence or sprouts from the uneasy seed planted in Agnes's psyche. As readers, we are never quite sure. We sympathize with the child Agnes from the start, even though we are perplexed by the actual author motivation in the introduction of a "Pillow Friend"--a doll once owned by Agnes's beloved and unconventional Aunt Marjorie that supposedly salved her pre-adolescent loneliness by sitting on her pillow at night and telling her stories. Forewarned by the old adage to `be careful what you wish for' Agnes hurls forward in her desire to possess the doll, Miles, that Marjorie so delightfully describes and upon receiving it for her birthday precariously careens into a world where her every wish inadvertently becomes the doll's command. But unlike the genie of Aladdin's cave, Miles delivers but reconstitutes Agnes's wants into a complex gumbo of twisted fairytales and strange unfinished symphonies that beg for explanations but just deaden an already confused and alienated persona that limps through each and every perspective telling moment of her life. Cleverly, Tuttle develops Agnes using the guidelines of a typical modern day girl--Agnes revels in her best friends, idolizes her individualistic aunt, goes crazy for her own particular little pony, waxes militantly feminist during high school and college and eventually wishes for the proverbial knight on the white charger. As she is particularly motivated by her search for romance, Agnes perhaps reflects the author's own feelings regarding this almost tedious desire that women of all ages ruthlessly and sometimes nonsensically pursue at the expense of all else. The perfect ending for the quintessential woman inevitably resolves itself in reference to a man and his achievements, relegating the woman to a smiling adjunct position. To