Skein and Bone by V H Leslie – a review
by Gary Fry
Before
picking up a copy of V H Leslie’s debut collection of short fiction, I’d read
only one of her tales, the opener here, called ‘Namesake’, which first appeared
– and deservedly so – in Best British
Horror 2013. Its artful combination of solid storytelling – yes, Leslie
does plots! – literary mechanisms, cool prose, and emotional material persuaded
me to seek out what I hoped would be more of the same.
I
wasn’t disappointed.
Skein and Bone is a
uniformly excellent collection, addressing an impressive range of subject
matters and offering some poetically striking imagery. Each tale feels very
different, and yet all are bound together by the same confident vision, the
same sharp writing, and the same dark vision. Let me take a number of the tales
in turn and discuss what I admired about them.
The
titular story ‘Skein and Bone’ has clear echoes of Aickman (‘The Trains’
springs most immediately to mind), as two young sisters take a railway journey
into off-the-beaten-track France and chance upon a refuge packed with baroque
and beautiful artefacts. There is sibling rivalry at work from the off, with a
variety of symbolic episodes dramatizing the woman’s relative attitudes to
selfhood, appearance, style. A dream sequence – a common technique used with strategic
skill by Leslie – will heighten the Biblical flavour of the place, until its
conclusion hardly pulls any macabre punches. It’s a memorably grim piece, but
one which also finds beauty among its human horrors: the power of beauty and
its capacity to become toxic when tempered.
‘Ghost’
feels like more of a black joke, with its grotesque final lines elevating this
kind of creature-focused fiction to a cruel gravitas; it’s certainly one of the
strangest ghost stories I’ve read, if indeed it can be described as such.
‘Family Tree’ feels like a similarly comic dark tale, with a boy’s
unconventional family providing a scenario in which the common youthful problem
of fitting in and making social connections is heightened considerably; the
conclusion, expected and grim, feels cold and yet true.
In ‘The
Blue Room’ – perhaps the most conventionally structured ghostly tale here – a
woman’s colourless life is given shape and vigour by a brief stay in a hotel.
The room in which she stays plays host to a sequence of supernatural events,
all focused on the colour blue, and which eventually spread into the rest of
the building, along with territory around the place. Leslie’s depiction of
dispirited female experience is cloying and moving, allowing the spooky
episodes to gain psychological resonance. The whole piece put me in mind of much
classic supernatural fiction, particularly the occasional ghostly tales of
Edith Wharton and other female writers.
‘Ulterior
Design’ is similarly inspired by classic dark fiction, in this case surely
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’. And yet here we have a male
character placed in peril by such a routine decoration, as his masculine sense
of control and order is jeopardise by his lover’s pregnancy, her modifications
of his home, and all the responsibilities that simply must follow. The guy’s
increasingly alarming visions of natural interference in his ruthlessly manmade
life take on tangible form, with (at first) peripheral damage, and then far
worse, and then…oh God, that last line is a real killer.
Other
tales I admired in this collection included ‘The Cloud Cartographer’, which
moves surreally to a cosmic finale; the developments – the way the backstory
relates to latter-day events – feel right here, building to a final few
paragraphs which move and stir. The plot of ‘Preservation’ rests upon a
gimmicky notion, and in less artful hands than Leslie’s it could all have been
a bit mediated; but again, the quality of characterisation, Leslie’s skill at
getting behind her people’s surface relations and into their private lives,
leads to a fantastic closing scene and a very appropriate last line. Similar
tricks are at play in ‘The Quiet Room’, which puts more of those carefully
located dream sequences to work with merciless force: the figure on the piano
is vivid and scary, and its final transformation all the more convincing after
this preparatory material. ‘Time Keeping’ revisits the logical world of men, with
a strident image of a partner rendered mechanically predictable, under his quantifiable
control.
There
are other stories in the book – the short and chilly ‘Bleak Midwinter’, with
its cast of unlikely stalkers; the weird ‘Wordsmith’, in which a man plants and
grows words; and the exotic ‘Senbazuru’, with its war-haunted couple and their deceptively
playful game – and, having discussed so many fine ones above, that’s just
testament to the range of quality on display here. Indeed, I felt as if I
gained something from every tale and genuinely enjoyed each for very different
reasons. And that’s what I call a fine collection.
Sometimes
tender, often shocking, frequently moving, and commonly beautiful, Skein and Bone is a remarkable book, the work of a writer in
full command of her craft and with apparently quite enough preoccupations and
curiosities, both domestic and global, to inform what I hope will be much more
to come.
You can
buy the book from Undertow Publications here: http://www.undertowbooks.com/issues/
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