Good evening!
I hope you’re all surviving the mercury retrograde and the weird weather we’re having at the minute! I’ve been in hibernation and reading quite a lot, which has been nice.
What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
I’ve been thinking quite a lot about humour in horror this week, because that’s what I’ve mainly been reading. The first book I read was an advanced copy of Alison Rumfitt’s Brainwyrms, which is out in October. Like her debut Tell Me I’m Worthless, this novel hits on some tough themes, such as how trans people are treated in Britain, family units and housing. There is slightly more focus on kink in this novel, and the body horror is more drawn out throughout the narrative rather than appearing at crucial points. It focuses on Frankie, a trans woman injured in the targeted bombing of a children’s Gender Identity Clinic. Frankie meets Vanya, a non-binary person who has a fetish for body parasites, and becomes infatuated with them. The more Frankie digs into Vanya’s strange living situation -- with an older man who looks and acts like he comes from money -- the more she suspects that something is not quite right.
As with the premise of Tell Me I’m Worthless, there doesn’t seem to be much room for humour, but both are, at times, very funny books. The social commentary takes on some of the more ridiculous elements of transphobia (out of the many ridiculous things it entails), like how it manifests and grows on Twitter, and the way that tiny details about trans people’s lives are magnified by the people who are obsessed with hating them. What Brainwyrms does well is hold up a mirror to this kind of behaviour and shows us how nonsensical it is in a variety of different contexts. The chapter headings sometimes actually made me laugh out loud.
After Brainwyrms I read Agustina Bazterrica’s short stories 19 Claws and a Blackbird, translated by Sarah Moses. This is published in May, and it’s actually the first thing I’ve read by her. Her novel Tender is the Flesh is hugely popular, and even though I’m not against popular novels, I don’t generally keep up with them. This was published during a time when a lot of novels that people love to describe as some variety on ‘unhinged woman books’ came out and I honestly can’t discern the differences between most of them. They seem to be recycled through a million different social media feeds in photos of neat book stacks and they all kind of blend into one.
My friend Rhys, who specialises in horror, read Tender is the Flesh for teaching and said it was extremely good, and he’s a hard man to please. When 19 Claws was sent to me I was intrigued by it for this reason, and because I’m always intrigued by horror and the Gothic in shorter forms because it’s difficult to do well.
Again, there doesn’t seem to be much room for humour in there, but the first story (spoilers ahead sorry) focuses on the moment that a dentist comes out onto her porch and is hit in the face with a pair of dentures that have fallen from the body of her naked neighbour. This image in itself is grotesque, obviously, but it also hinted at a sense of humour that then drew me into the rest of the collection. It’s something that makes you feel guilty for laughing at, but most of the things that we find funny don’t really make sense anyway so I don’t think it should be very different in horror.
Horror that doesn’t have a bit of a sense of humour doesn’t really interest me, not just because it sets off the edge of the gross stuff, but because it improves the gross stuff (in my opinion). Most of the things that actually happen in horror stories are a bit ridiculous, and it frustrates me when that isn’t acknowledged. Really good horror often has an element of social commentary (violence for violence’s sake can come across as quite cheap), and when we’re shown that something is worthy of criticism, we’re shown how ridiculous it is -- which then makes it funny.
There are lots of humorous moments in 19 Claws, and equally there are a lot of sad, tense and strange moments. The stranger stories are the better ones, because she really leans into how oddly people can behave. My favourite one was set in New York, centring on a woman who goes to see a famous psychiatrist at the recommendation of her really irritating friend. The friend is like one of those particularly annoying people in Nora Ephron films, those characters who appear briefly and never stop talking and are either very banal or extremely intelligent and don’t have a social filter. This particular story reads like a Daphne du Maurier or Jean Rhys or even a Dorothy Parker, in that the tension can’t quite be placed accurately and there is a comparion to be made between the very sharp imagery against a dreamy, vague narration or character.
I’m now about half way through My Men by Victoria Kielland, translated from the Norwegian by Damion Searls, which is out in July. This also has a very dreamy narrative style, and does a lot of interesting stuff with communicating emotion. It is also a horror in that it is about the serial killer Belle Gunness, a Norwegian immigrant in America who killed multiple men during the nineteenth century. It’s extremely good and so far I can see why it won loads of awards in Norway -- will talk about it in more detail next week.
Books on my radar
I had a bit of a ‘I deserve a treat’ moment during the week and bought some books in Waterstones. I had a voucher but obviously went over it -- such is life. I bought Susanna Moore’s new novel The Lost Wife (2023), which I’ve been extremely excited for since reading In the Cut (1995), one of my favourite reads of the year so far. I also bought Mark Hyatt’s Love, Leda (2023), which is the first time this novel has been published, despite being written in the 1960s. It’s set in London’s gay scene of the time, and written by poet Mark Hyatt, who only learned to read and write as an adult. I also bought John Darnielle’s Devil House (2022), another horror. I’m in my horror era, what can I say.