Book Review: Angel Fur and Other Stories by Csilla Toldy — A Daring Short Story Collection That Exposes the Intimate Politics of Desire, Displacement and Delusion

From the opening story Necrophilia, it’s clear that Angel Fur and Other Stories (Stupor Mundi) isn’t interested in playing nice. Csilla Toldy doesn’t craft polite literary fiction for the Sunday supplement crowd. Rather, she gives us brutal humour and quiet horror, laced with the surreal clarity of a bad dream you secretly want to re-enter. This short story collection takes the mundane (a state worker, a lover’s betrayal, a girl at university) and jacks the voltage, until every scene vibrates with unspoken menace or absurdity. In Necrophilia, the fetishisation of power becomes grotesquely literal as a former hairdresser hoards the hair clippings of Lenin himself. “The crescent moons of fertile aggression,” she calls his nail clippings. Grotesque! But still so precise it sticks like old gum under your shoe. Toldy has a gift for taking an image and twisting it until it’s unforgettable, the grotesqueness becomes sacred, the sacred becomes a joke, and the joke often hides a trauma too big to name.

Toldy’s sharpest tool is her ability to layer irony with pain, often through characters who have no idea how absurd they sound. Off the Hook is a standout in this regard, a narrative that walks the line between erotic confession and bitter comedy. Lidia’s descent into an affair is laced with operatic introspection: “I walked into this doomed adventure as if it were my birthright.” It’s the kind of line that sounds deep until you realise how much it says about self-delusion. Toldy uses internal monologue not for exposition, but as critique, the real drama isn’t the affair itself, but Lidia’s desperate attempt to cast herself as a tragic heroine in a world that’s quietly mocking her. When she finally unravels the lover’s emotional manipulation, the epiphany doesn’t come with fanfare, but with a grim punchline: “I mistook this gratitude for falling in love.” It’s a takedown of the female Bildungsroman disguised as soap opera, and it works.

In stories like Cassandra, Toldy shifts gears into a more formally traditional narrative voice, but the thematic content stays spiky. Here, the titular character isn’t just a misunderstood prodigy, she’s a calculated thief, plagiarising a poem in a university writing group. Toldy takes what could have been a lazy trope (the mentally fragile genius girl) and injects it with genuine moral unease. The narrator isn’t blameless either. Her righteous outrage is undercut by hints of envy and latent cruelty. “Law and morality had been on my side, but I had been cruel,” she admits, and it’s that kind of raw introspection that lifts Toldy’s stories out of the classroom and into something messier, more adult. Cassandra asks difficult questions about art, authorship and who gets to be broken, and it doesn’t spoon-feed any answers.

Then there’s the titular Angel Fur, a story that shouldn’t work on paper but absolutely does. A celebrity in emotional freefall dons paper wings and disappears into a fantasy of erotic rebellion and champagne-drenched revenge. What sounds like a fever dream unfolds with meticulous control. Toldy’s real trick is tonal tightrope walking. This story could easily veer into parody or pretension, but instead it hits somewhere between Angela Carter and early Pedro Almodóvar. The protagonist’s descent into absurdity isn’t a failure, it’s a kind of punk exorcism. Perfect for us! When she wraps a homeless youth in her fur coat and gives him a kiss for the cameras, it’s both a performative act of charity and a genuine grasp at connection. That tension, between spectacle and sincerity, liberation and collapse, is where Toldy’s work lives and thrives.

What makes Angel Fur and Other Stories essential reading for wide readers of contemporary fiction is its refusal to slot neatly into any trend or form. This isn’t minimalist autofiction, nor is it baroque fabulism. Instead, it’s a literary fiction collection rooted in the political realities of migration, post-Communist fallout and feminine agency, but delivered with the stylistic elasticity of someone who’s lived across borders and writes like it. In a small press literature scene increasingly obsessed with tone over substance, Toldy’s stories don’t whisper, they snarl, seduce and sting. Angel Fur and Other Stories isn’t just another short story collection from independent publishing. No, it’s a reminder that new writing should risk something. Toldy risks it all and the result is electric.

About the Author

Csilla Toldy is a writer and translator. Her poetry and fiction books are: Red Roots – Orange Sky (2013), The Emigrant Woman’s Tale (2015) and Vertical Montage (2013, 2015, 2018 Lapwing Belfast) Angel Fur and other stories (2019 Stupor Mundi) and Bed Table Door , a novel (2023, Wrecking Ball).