The Weird that Got Me Through 2020 - Alex Carabine

Read

Lauren Beukes, The Shining Girls

The genre of this book is impossible to pin down, as it incorporates aspects of gothic, sci-fi, thriller, criminal investigation and…time travel?!  A serial killer is able to murder young women across time, utilising a ‘haunted’ house, and his only survivor begins to piece it together.  You would think that under the weight of so much genre, the narrative would collapse, but the consistent threads are enough to fascinate and pull you through the chaos of interweaving narratives.  Which, incidentally, force you to ponder the nature of hauntings, memory, trauma and time.  Usually, I struggle with crime novels, because while I acknowledge that a disproportionate amount of crimes happen to women, crime fiction can often devolve into a sadistic catalogue that may as well be entitled “Girls, and the awful things to do to them.”  Thus, a balance between realism and good storytelling can be hard to find.  Beukes, however, gives the victims of the text brief but believable characters, so their voices and identities claim the focus of the narrative.  

Daisy Johnson, Fen

This collection of short stories helped me get through the betwixt-and-between week that separates Christmas from New Year.  Even in an average year, that week seems removed from time, but 2020 made it an especially disorientating experience (I’m sure this was the case for many of us, who were unable to reunite with families over the festive period).  And how did I choose to cope?  With blunt, bleak short stories in which a girl transforms into an eel and a house falls in love with a girl, amongst others.  I loved Johnson’s unapologetic representation of metamorphosis, where absolutely no explanation is offered for the supernatural elements in the stories.  The transformations collapsed the boundaries between humanity and nature, symbolised by the liminal nature of the fen of the title – neither land nor sea, the fen occupies a space of dark potential in the texts.  However, I do have to acknowledge that the stories somewhat bleed together if you devour them in one gulp like I did, so I would recommend that future readers pace themselves. 

Watch

Lord of Illusions (Clive Barker, 1995)

I cannot get this film out of my head, and will probably write a longer piece on it for the blog eventually.  As a noir, it is relatively paint-by-numbers: it comes complete with the PI with the dry wit, the femme-fatale in the red dress, and the villain with a nefarious network stitched across the underbelly of LA.  So far, so neo-noir.  However, it is actually a supernatural horror-noir in which the private detective does not get drawn into corruption, drugs, or what have you – but rather a demonic cult with Lovecraftian undertones, and the anti-hero is a real sorcerer posing as a fake Hollywood magician, who stole his craft from the villain.  And the nefarious network?  The survivors of the cult who are trying to earn the villain’s love by summoning a demonic hell-dimension.  I didn’t know I was waiting for this film until I found it.

Listen

Ruby Throat, ‘Baby Darling Taporo’

It feels somewhat counter-intuitive to include an album on a site run by literature post-grads, but Katie Jane Garside (creative force behind Ruby Throat, amongst other bands) is what I would consider a literary musician.  Her songs and music videos reference authors as temporally disparate as Angela Carter and Ovid, and her lyrics reference concepts of the uncanny such as ghosts and witches, as well as the heart-wrenchingly human, like abuse and anorexia.  Through Garside, the weird becomes a lens to reconsider the deeply personal, and the sorrow and rage of her songs make bizarre lyrics like ‘You and I feel nothing | Dancing on the ice floe with the dead things | I watch you set your lovely wings on fire | So let’s die here, on the sofa’ feel like a universal experience of horror and grief, rather than the brief lunatic vignette it appears out of context.  If the surreality and melancholy of 2020 had a soundtrack, it would be ‘Baby Darling Taporo.’