“My wife has brine instead of blood. She’s full of the sea.
I can taste it in her sweat, her tears, her sex. She’s crafty and quick. She’s
lunar. She’s tidal.”
“When we wake again as human beings she says, “Of course I
love, you, monster.””
Priya Sharma’s debut short story collection All The Fabulous
Beasts (2018) heralds a powerful new voice in horror and dark fantasy
fiction. The stories collected here are luminously beautiful with dark depths.
Sharma uses folklore, mythology and monsters to help us confront truly modern
anxieties around sexuality, embodiment, inheritance and guilt. Over 16 stories,
Sharma demonstrates her skill at constructing powerful and disturbing visions
using beautiful yet concise language, as well as drawing her readers into the
minds of a varied cast of troubled and troubling characters. The end result is
essential reading for anyone who loves horror, or enjoys their myths and
folktales with a healthy helping of darkness.
Transformation is a key theme in Sharma’s tales, and images
of the human body merged or converted into the animal recur throughout the
collection. ‘Fabulous Beasts’ tells of two women who can transform into snakes;
they have shed their previous identities like snakeskin so they can move on
from their abusive upbringing. ‘The Nature of Bees’ sees its protagonist
brought into an insectile family and groomed to be their new queen. ‘Fish Skins’
explores the relationship between a human fisherman and a mermaid, and the debt
they owe each other to be able to live together. The protagonist of ‘A Son of
the Sea’ undergoes a painful transformation resulting in a male birthing scene.
These stories use the animal to symbolise our uncomfortable relationship with
our bodies, the characters falling prey to uncontrollable desires, exploring
hidden aspects of their sexuality, or finding themselves learning a new and
challenging social language as their animal natures disrupt how they interact
with the human and the natural.
If Sharma’s transformations straddle the line between
frightening and enticing, her characters gaining something new and invigorating
in exchange for their humanity, All The Fabulous Beasts contains other
stories in which the body is not transformed but mutilated. In ‘The Anatomist’s
Mnemonic’, the protagonist’s fetishization of hands is taken to such an extreme
that when the woman of his dreams has hands that aren’t up to scratch, impromptu
surgery is the only answer. The Show updates Clive Barker’s Books of
Blood for the TV age, with the hosts of a fraudulent ghost hunting show
wind up accidentally finding more than they bargained for. ‘Rag and Bone’ imagines
a Liverpool ruled over by a vampiric elite who maintain their immortality by feeding
off the bodies of the poor and disadvantaged. Other stories feature
transformations gone wrong, such as the returned lover in ‘The Sunflower Seed
Man’, the vengeful revenant in ‘The Rising Tide’ who the protagonist cannot stave
off, or the man who has his shadow removed by a wronged servant in ‘The Absent
Shade’. Others focus on extraordinary people down on their luck. The woman in ‘Small
Town Stories’ can see the dead, but the murder of her mother and her best friend
by her father has paralysed her in time. ‘Pearls’ shows us Medusa and Poseidon
passing as human in the modern world, washed up and alienated.
A couple of the stories focus particularly on female
embodiment and sexuality, and ideas around gendered assumption, pregnancy and
childbirth. The protagonist in ‘Egg’ so desperately wants a child she makes a
deal with a witch, while ‘The Crow Palace’ explores similar ideas but from the
point of view of a changeling. Both stories offer a frank and in-depth
examination of the pressure to have children and fears around infertility, as
well as exploring the complexities of the parent/child relationship, especially
when the child does not match the preconceived ideas about family life that the
parent has. The stories compliment each other well, with the opposing
viewpoints of parent and daughter allowing Sharma to subtly explore these ideas
with depth and sympathy.
An undercurrent running throughout the collection is the
damage wrought by Western patriarchal colonialist attitudes. We can see this in
the casual disregard the rich have for the lives they feed on in ‘Rag and Bone’.
This comes to the surface in several of the more powerful stories in the collection.
‘The Ballad of Boomtown’ explores how the selfishness and indulgence of investors
have cursed an abandoned development town in Ireland, both on a personal and an
institutional level. The au pair in ‘The Absent Shade’ is from a poor
background, forced to work for a rich family where she is casually seduced by
the father and loses her job because of the son’s jealousy. ‘The Englishman’
explores cross-cultural identity, and the feeling of being part of two cultures
but feeling welcome in neither.
For all the fantastic nature of much of the horror of these
stories, Sharma’s deft characterisation and vivid sense of place means that
they always contain an element of the real and the relatable. Sharma makes good
use of her settings, from Liverpool and its environs to Ireland and Wales, all
vividly drawn and with a lived-in feel. The depth of her characters makes the
reader engage with them, however unsympathetic, dark or disturbed they become. All
The Fabulous Beasts is a powerful and engaging collection, one whose
stories will haunt the reader long after they have turned the last page. I look
forward to reading whatever Priya Sharma writes next.
