Reviews by Gina Wisker
British Library Tales of the Weird: Doomed Romances, Strange
Tales of Uncanny Love (2024), ed. Joanna Ella Parsons (303 pages)
This is an exciting, quite different collection of romance tales, as Ella Parsons says in her introduction, “romance has a problem. It loves stereotypes. Fairy tale princesses who sleep peacefully until their princes wake them with non consensual kisses.” Already we have a critique here of the way in which male dominance and fantasy of true love operate in romantic tales from fairy tales to horror. In horror, we are told, they often end up showing their dark side, with the idealised prince turning out to be a serial killer.
This selection is a rich mix of romance, genre traits and the challenges to these traits, which derive from recognising ‘there is nothing sexier than a dead woman’, or, as Poe himself said, ‘The death, of a beautiful woman is, questionably, the most poetical topic in the world – and equally is it beyond doubt that lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover’. This definitely silences the dead beloved.
So, this collection deliberately exposes some of the rather unpleasant, sadistic and masochistic domination tendencies that lie behind romances. And, of course, these are weird tales, which transgress moral and sexual boundaries. The collection’s introduction ranges between Dracula, Stephanie Meyer and Jilly Cooper, and here you can expect challenges to notions of romance and love, which are insidiously leaking into hauntings, unquiet slumbers and eternal torment. LeFanu’s ‘Carmilla’ is early in this collection, the tale of a beautiful vampire companion whose relationship with a young girl, dominated by her father and the local general, can be read by some as just predatory behaviour, but it has also been recognised as a story where the most threatening elements to a conventional reader are its lesbian undertones and overtones, since Carmilla, a visiting noble lady, and Laura, the young woman to whom she acts as a companion, clearly have an ongoing relationship, which threatens the patriarchal norms and control of the two men. The way in which many now read ‘Carmilla’ is perhaps not as intended by the author. J. Sheridan Le Fanu‘s tale is seen as a rich celebration of erotic, consensual, potential lesbian love, since Laura hears and imagines Carmilla long after she's been disposed of by the dominant males.
Several of these tales are to some extent already feminist favourites. Angela Carter’s ‘The Lady of the House of Love’ is a vampire story exposing seduction and romantic love as flawed and deadly. In this exquisite tale, the doomed descendant of Dracula lives under a curse in a grand house, and her daily nightly routine, when it can, incorporates trapping, romancing and then disposing of travelling, visiting young men. However, one night, her fate is sealed when her heart is lost to a young soldier heading for the front of the First World War. So, the blood sacrifice of the cursed Countess seems nothing to the horrors he's going to enter. But for her, the moment of love, recognising her passions, brings death, which is also a release. Yet again, the woman is sacrificed, but in this instance what happens is she has recognised both her own passion and her curse. Nalo Hopkinson’s Caribbean Canadian tale ‘The Glass Bottle Trick’ re-visits that eternally popular, deceitful, dominant love story of Bluebeard, with an older, richer, established man seeking a young, naive bride, a scenario with its roots in times and place where women play more subservient roles, are less likely to have the power of money, jobs and social position and so seek survival as well as support through marriage. Hopkinson’s version is an Afro-American Caribbean tale, with duppies (spirits) in bottles, actually the previous wives of Samuel, who drives a car and has a good job and looks like a fine husband for the more partying Beatrice. Samuel initially explains that the bottles in the tree are nothing to worry about. However, those who know Caribbean custom will recognise that duppies are contained, not quite totally extinguished, maybe quite riotous and lively spirits. In fact, these are his previous wives, who made the mistake of getting pregnant, at which point Samuel froze them in an airconditioned backroom, the keys to which lurk among the usual group of household keys in a Bluebeard story. Beatrice takes the keys, investigates the rooms and finds the previous wives almost frozen, with their spirits trapped outside in the bottles. In releasing them, it isn't necessarily the case that sisterhood (a feminist reading) will prevail. But Samuel has been exposed in his Bluebeard serial killer role, and Beatrice has probably learned her lesson about not trusting men with money and big houses. At the core of this tale is the damage of racism, Samuel’s own internalised self-loathing, his terror of reproducing his own children, since Samuel has internalised a negative version of his own racialized self. This is both a feminist tale and a decolonial tale exposing the tragic consequences of racially based self-hate.
These doomed romances each have a social comment, whether
about gendered, sexual or racial inequalities and damage, and about
the dangers of over-investing in romance itself. The book contains 12
tales of dark romance and undying passions from 1832 to 2002, from Mary
Shelley and Wilkie Collins to Angela Carter, Nalo Hopkinson, Tracy Fahey,
Kalamu Ya Salaam, Alice Perrin and V Castro. These tales darkly challenge
classical romance. The book is very carefully curated and would make
a great course reader.
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Cast From Darkness,
Marge Simon and Mary Turzillo (2023), Mind's Eye Publications, Elgin,
ISBN 9798988792437
(79 pages)
This new collection from Mary Turzillo and Marge Simon has a front cover paying homage to Dracula on a dark London street, courtesy of Marge Simon. A formidably talented pair of collaborators, their work is always surprising, delicious and beautifully written, and as a partnership they have produced several collections over the years, as well as presenting together at ICFA and elsewhere. This year Mary is author guest of honour; Marge has been similarly honoured previously, along with her writer husband Bruce Boston.
Hearing them read is always dark fun and reading this collection reignites that joy and appreciation of the individual expert management of language and the way that together Marge and Mary clearly influence each other between these short works (not all are poems). So, I commend the whole to you as an expert product and a delectable dark experience.
The collection opens with ‘Who Live in Darkness’ a keynote story from Marge about the dark threat of only semi-remembered evils that lurk in one's past and which are coming to get you in the present. This collection is filled with memories, some suppressed, some lurking in objects such as a post on the very stair from where you threw your baby brother down to his death or a Colorado Canyon when other small bodies floated down the mountainside: “eyes blazing with hatred, small white hands reaching for me.” Learning that you might be the next victim and remembering horrible deeds, sacrifices, family murders and that you might well be punished for half-suppressed, half-acknowledged crime is a consistent theme throughout this collection where you can hear how Marge and Mary have riffed off each other's work and built something new each time. The individual voices come through their individual work, but the constant running bloodied stream and bloodied staircase length between the dark deeds remembered and approaching for some kind of recompense, some kind of punishment, is a stream, a backbone running throughout the collection.
There's quite a lot of sacrifices in here, sometimes of
young women whose crimes might just be their sexuality, or their gender.
We never know. The language is rich. Everybody seems here to walk ‘in
an unseen death cloud’. Some short works remind of folklore sacrifices
and reckonings. One really scary story by Mary is just called ‘Space’,
in which the family moving into a house discover a woman walled up under
the first floor floorboards. She had been there for perhaps 15 years
to avoid going to school without her English homework. This sounds quite
mundane, but she might not be able to read and write, she might be going
blind and the terrible responsibility for the people who've moved into
the house is that they have no idea how to trace her, so they just carry
on feeding her while she continues to live in the crawlspace. Houses
for Marge in ‘Knock on wood’ have more than ‘dear
memories of childhood and sliding down the bannisters’. Once came
the day when she ‘meant no harm’ in a game gone wrong and
pushed a boy to death down the stairs. He reappears in a poem by Mary,
‘Little Brother Big Sis’, as the brother who's thrown down
the stairs. The writing influences between the two run rich and fast
throughout this collection.
In ‘An American Gothic after Grant Wood’ Marge unpicks an
iconic American painting of the farmer standing, pitchfork in hand,
staring at the neighbouring farm where there is a man who shot at him
for trespassing. The blood on the ends of the pitchfork hint that there's
lots of meat in the freezer. Dislike of one's neighbours sometimes crosses
continents and the next poem about vicious trees and old anger between
couples is followed by another work based on a painting, Edward Hopper's
People in the Sun. A ghost of the artist’s model explains
who's who and unpicks the sense of connubial bliss, telling the reader
that the wife shot the husband. Some of the poems and stories reflect
ageing. In one, a King Lear figure is unable to work his own buttons
and bewails the loss of Cordelia.
Dead upstairs, downstairs behind the walls, in the fridge freezer, relationships are always predatory, so even in ‘The Color Purple’, the woman who wanted to be painted winds up poisoned by her lover, and this riffs off other artists’ work. Husband-wife relationships are always suspect, such as in ‘Two Wives’, one of Mary's poems with animal characters, which are darkly sensuous, filled with luscious evil, jealousy, tables turned and historic grudges sorted out. Houses, staircases, fridges, freezers, kitchens are all dangerous places, and old revived relationships are differently rewarding from those that plod along in the family home. There are also a fair number of sacrifices in this collection, which next moves to Ripper Street in the East End of London, where the dubious doctor remembers his fun past with the local prostitutes and enjoys taking revenge on those who are ‘still corrupting’ its men calling them ‘strumpet’ as he heads for them, skilful with the blade. This deadly scenario gives way to another in Mary's poem of being lost in the woods in ‘the tangle of darkness in the sleet following voice on a cell phone’ in the cold and the dark, without gloves. This latter is one of many nightmarish, recurring images and memories that run through this collection. But women are not always prey, even for some of the marauding soldiers in some of the work in here. Marge Simon has a poem in which a night wandering woman seeking prey comes across a night wandering man, both sad, both hunting, both seeking blood. This could be the last poem of the collection for me; the reuniting of a gothic vampiric zombie(?) couple, now an image filled with fiction, film and dream. The sadness of a recognition of being the only undead creatures left, ‘suddenly she knows – indeed, they both know –.’ They are the undead, the only creatures left. There is no lifeblood to be had. There are several other poems or stories about fragility, e.g. ‘Eel Soup’, where the male partner offers the fragile wife the helpings of the specially constructed meal to finish her off. Her healthy flush is matched by his stomach cramps. Clearly it was their last meal and the wife got some kind of revenge at this point. At the end of ‘Legend’, a short story, mothers are dying, children remembering ghosts and there are dead flowers. A woman who turns from a cat and then back, with claws, with hands the size of a prey animal. This is one of Mary's familiar cat pieces. And Marge has a cat piece too. But they're never quite cats in these tales. The final poem ‘Oblivia Mori’, by Mary, has dying children and that eternal knowledge of cats about death in a moment of the virus. It is appropriate to end with immorality, rather than immortality.
This collection is dancing with death and deadly meals. It’s delicious, dangerous, domestic, has ’Living Dead Dog’ memories, settling scores, family and relational predation, the lack of any comfort of strangers and always a cat in your lap.
