Moïra Fowley is the well-regarded author of three Young Adult novels, best known of which is The Accident Season. Eyes Guts Throat Bones is her first venture into stories for adults, which came about when she abandoned writing a fourth YA novel during the pandemic to bring, in her own words, something “bloody and beautiful” screaming into the world in a “horror-adjacent” mode.
The first story, What Would You Give for a Treat Like Me, is a strong opener: a vivid, neatly executed post-apocalyptic road story with fairytale echoes. The world has been taken over by forest and a wider spirit of transformation that has somehow been set loose by the coming together of the unnamed narrator and her partner Melissa. A group of adults and children are driven forward by the need to survive. The party are consumed by sudden alteration into bullfrogs, bears, wolf cubs, rose bushes; into salt crystals or gingerbread that crumbles into sugary grains. When the couple arrive, alone, at their destination, the lost children return in their mutated forms, two of them made of mud and mulch “smelling of damp dead things, earthworms in their ears and woodlice between their teeth, eyes still shining”. Melissa seems to have known this outcome all along. “Come in little children, [she] said. Come inside.”
