Teaching is one of the great joys in my life, though it wasn’t always that way. Once upon a time, it was “just” a job—something I clung to desperately as my film criticism career ebbed away, always aware that my sole university degree was in journalism, not education. In a way, it took losing a full-time teaching position, as well as using that loss to (eventually) jump-start my the next phase of my professional fiction-writing career, to reconnect me with the quote-quote simple joys of helping someone else nurture their own creative spark by spinning a moment’s absent thought into something entirely different, black on white, words on a page. A beautiful, tumorous blossom of metaphor run wild with narrative for blood, referential imagery for bone.
This is how I first met Sarah Read . . . not in body, but mind to mind. By watching a creepy, frightening, wonderful idea she pitched me evolve, stage by stage, into something which would eventually become one of the best horror stories of the year. It was called “Endoskeletal,” and you’ll meet it soon enough, since it opens this debut collection of Sarah’s short fiction. Let me put it to you this way: it makes me wish I’d written it, even though I know damn well I never could have.
The walls of the jar were thin enough that she could see the glow of light behind it, and the silhouette of a lumpy shadow inside. She photographed every angle, every detail, and made sure the pictures were uploaded and saved before grabbing her scalpel and tweezers. She both hated and wanted this part. Her pulse grew distracting, a pounding in her sore joints, and it would continue to rise until the beautiful thing in front of her was destroyed. And destroying the sample would destroy her career, or make it.
Now granted, any story involving archaeology is basically guaranteed my full attention, but what I love about what Sarah’s doing here is the way she cross-breeds her utterly convincing grasp of methodology with sharp psychological observation, making us care deeply about both the artefact her protagonist is examining and her own bone-deep regret that the only way to confirm the ancient mystery before her—let alone to understand it—is to lose even a single part of something so irreplaceable. Simple, clear, concise, human; these sentences confirm how much I love the way that Sarah thinks, almost as much as I love the things she thinks about. What I like best about this paragraph, in other words, is pretty much everything.
But man, I kind of like this one that comes a bit later on even better:
Panting, she held her hands up to the light. Her knuckles twisted as the skin pulled tighter. The grooves of her knuckles split, the fissures like small gaping mouths from which erupted bone upon bone. She shrieked at the sting of it and tried to close the split flesh by straightening her fingers, felt the pressure grow, pulsing under her nails—saw the white of bone pale like blisters at the tips of her fingers. She stretched her fingers further and the skin burst, springing back along the protruding shafts of bone, curling back like a blooming flower.
It’s always very funny to me, the generalized received wisdom that women aren’t supposed to embrace horror, when horror is—in a lot of ways—the female condition, as well as the human one: body horror, social horror, moral horror. Some of the meat-suits we’re born into can bleed seven days and not die, or come pre-equipped to incubate, then push forth, a parasitical proto-human only partially made from our own DNA, whom we may not automatically love simply because we’re “automatically” genetically pre-disposed to. Politicians and religious leaders often seem bent on reducing us to mere extensions of our bodily functions, while the marriage-happy fairytale the media spends much of its time selling us on is alarmingly far more likely to end less in happily ever after than in violence and rancor, divorce at best, murder-suicide at worst. Turn a prospective lover down and you might get shot, get acid thrown in your face, get your baby thrown over a shopping mall balcony in order to teach you a lesson. Every woman I know doesn’t have just one #MeToo story, but a handful—at the least. The very, very least.
Browse the Internet for ten minutes (or wait a similar length of time after making a Twitter post about equalized gender representation in fandom), and you’ll soon find out that we’re Other by literal nature, pariahs, witches, bitches, Staceys—hollow things made from spare parts, malign and perverse, never content to just shut the hell up and do what we’re told. We steer dudes around by their parts, suck their virility dry in their dreams, prevent them from being the men they always expected to become by depriving them of . . . um, ourselves, I guess: mothers, wives, sex-toys. Something permanently less, perfectly designed to make any random guy feel like something permanently more.
It’s like the joke about the old Jewish man who, when asked why he kept on re-reading the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, replied: “Because I want to remember how powerful I supposedly am.” Except in our case, the book in question is not just Malleus Malificarum, that Burning Times textbook on how to find evil creepy penis-stealing ladies anywhere a dissatisfied guy might glance, but almost every other myth and fairytale going back through time . . . these endless fantasies of sexual lure and betrayal, of cannibal mothers, of lying scolds whose evil words inevitably come true, spinning spells from insults. Sin on legs, constantly on the run from Eve’s legacy: a tryst with the serpent that ruined a previously perfect world by letting in not only knowledge, but death.
And I have to say, after a while, the idea that every woman is a barely-disguised potential monster starts to sound pretty good, by comparison. “Baba Yaga wouldn’t have to take this sort of crap,” you find yourself thinking; or Tiamat, or Lilith, or Echidna, or Kayako. Pretty soon you’re having fantasies of your own, ones which all too often end with you getting offered butter/a delicious life by a sexy- voiced black goat and rising into the dark air on boiled baby-fat, laughing hysterically. Or losing everything and getting burned at the stake, whichever comes first!
Sarah Read gets all this, on a very basic level, and the scenarios she comes up with to combat the all- too-mundane horrors of the world around us burn and shine with a darkness that immerses, entrances, inspires. Her anger and humour are equally resonant; science and the supernatural interbreed freely, spawning all sorts of unique and fascinating nightmares. And all of it reads with the same snap, the same flare, the same gorgeously offhand-seeming gothic grotesquerie: insects and angels, storms and spectres, curdled love, transforming grief. This book is full of awful, delightful things, and I’m so glad it exists, I can’t even tell you.
So read on or don’t, but never say you weren’t warned. It takes a certain type of person to write like Sarah Read writes. Luckily for the rest of us, however, all we have to do in order to enjoy the fruits of her labour . . . is to develop a taste.