White Wedding

White Wedding is a novel by Kathleen J. Woods. A mysterious woman drifts from a pleasure mansion into a backyard wedding, and the lives of everyone there are thrown into disarray.

Nobody knows who she is. The caterer gives in to her advances. The pregnant bride and her tangled family are trying to stage a fairytale wedding in the heat of a summer sun. Charlotte, the bride's stepsister, lets the wanderer into her car in the middle of the night, against her better judgment.

The woman is caked in dried blood and other bodily fluids. She exists in layers of sense and story, like a nesting doll of pornographic tales in which fantasy and the banal collide and blur. She gives everyone she meets what they want, whether or not they welcome it.

The novel is visceral, vivid and spare, and its many bodies and ecstasies echo and push against inherited American stories about gender, shame and pleasure. With an edge of both humor and horror, Woods asks whether, and how, we consent to our own desires.