ruce Boston writes short, high impact pieces about the wives of demons, sasquatches, ghosts and other creatures. In 1993, Boston gathered twelve of these into a collection, Accursed Wives (Night Visions, 1993). He continued to expand his collection of these freaks of nature and the supernatural and their wives. This current, more complete, collection gathers five short stories and 34 poems from Science Fiction Age, Asimov's, Weird Tales and elsewhere. Boston writes of women married to everything from aliens to werewolves, not to speak of cyborgs, mad scientists, time-travelers and even torturers.
Boston is the only writer ever to be named as Grand Master by the Science Fiction Poetry Association, and he has won both the Asimov's poetry award and the Rhysling award (given for science fiction poetry) a record of six times each. Each piece is a miniature romance--without the happy ending. Each has a plot and two characters. In "The Curse of the Hypnotist's Wife," a woman is enslaved by the power of suggestion to an ugly, cruel man. "The Curse of the Science-Fiction Editor's Wife" is about a man so detached from reality that when his wife screams in agony, he hands her a rejection slip.
Boston says he that writes the Cursed Wives to expose real-life domestic cruelty, and will donate some of the proceeds to an organization for abused women.
Love gone wrong can feel so right
Boston has the gift of making his poetry appealing to people who generally aren't fond of poetry. At first blush, it seems that most of the poems are free verse, with no set rhythm, and no rhyme scheme. Yet they have a distinctive music that is quite ravishing. A more careful look reveals the skill that induces the seductive mood of these pieces. First, Boston uses techniques of Romantic poets, and particularly Poe, to reveal the love that hurts. His Lovecraftian vocabulary, right next to his Wives' and Husbands' trendy vernacular, plays to the horror-reader in everybody's subconscious.
He creates cadences more subtle than Poe's by using syllabic and blank verse with startlingly varied iambic pentameter. He creates his own stanza forms. He also manipulates rhyme in sly and original ways. Instead of creating predictable, boring end-rhyme patterns, he uses advanced techniques: slant, internal, and vowel rhyme. He even borrows a trick from Shakespeare, and rhymes just the last lines of some poems. The poems read like colloquial speech, but are nimbly crafted to croon subliminal music.
Boston, planning the sequence of his pieces, settled on alphabetical order. A judgment call: for thematic flow, he might have grouped his monsters into real-world husbands (Science Fiction Editor, Torturer, the Fantasy-Writers, etc.), creatures of science fiction (the Alien and Time-Traveler, etc.), and imaginary men (Satyr's and Ghost, etc.).
How complete is complete? The irrepressible Boston may well introduce more Accursed Wives, and there are Cursed Husband poems: "The Curse of the Siren's Husband" and "The Curse of Medusa's Husband." There exist even poems by other poets--Denise D. Dumars and Scott L. Towner--each called "The Curse of Bruce Boston's Wife." He couldn't include these--he had to stop somewhere. Expressive black and white illustrations by Allen Koszowski, reminiscent of Virgil Finlay's work, capture the horror of several Wives.
