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.”
Flowers is another witchy tale in which transformation arises from a relationship between two young women, to be visited on a small town in Mayo: Tess, a local, and Emer, the “blow-in” from the big city. “The first time we kissed it rained flowers for a week … Enormous papery peonies and tiny violets, buttercup and sorrel.” When they look at each other there is a tornado and when they speak there is a landslide. Tess is thrilled with the love affair, but Emer is motivated by a deeper attraction to destruction.
In the story Nature Morte, Sophie and Adeline are young artists studying in Paris. Adeline’s apparently motiveless suicide on the métro is described in horror-genre fashion, with a scattering on the tracks of “blood and bits of brain”. While Sophie’s grief is dramatised through the figure of a companionable gory monster, the death does not weigh as tragedy, its main purpose seeming to be to tell the story of the partner’s artistic development. In the context of the terrible real-life picture of suicide among young LGBT+ people, to use the theme in this way is, at the least, disquieting.
Some of the stories exhaust their interest in a single reading, and others before that, such as Only Corpses Stay, another post-apocalypse tale: an adventure story with many characters not very well distinguished from one another, and with an ending that fizzles. This is a shame as there are a number of strong, distinctive and memorable pieces here as well, such as The Carrier, a body horror about pregnancy. Rath, perhaps the strongest story, concerns on/off best friends and lovers who spend every midsummer’s night together, from teens into middle age, on an ancient burial mound, underneath which lie the remains and the spirit of a fierce warrior queen: “a space for wildness. Madness. Secrets.”
Big Round Ball of Light and the Water is a fine folkloric tale of seven women on a western isle who sing the sun out of the sea to start each day. Written with an appealing, rhythmic texture, like others in the book it seems to demand to be read aloud.
Fowley’s themes of sex, desire and destruction are presented, often skilfully, using a wide variety of genre fiction tropes, and with an adult clarity and viscerality that put them, in theory, beyond the young teen reader. But their handling sometimes lacks the depth and seriousness of the best genre and genre-adjacent writers working out of horror, fairytales, fantasy and science fiction – writers such as Kelly Link and Carmen Maria Machado. Fowley’s delight in the sinister and erotic will no doubt entertain and engage many readers, but overall, the book reads like a transitional work, not entirely sure of its audience, where the quality of the best stories is not sustained throughout.
Eyes Guts Throat Bones is published by W&N (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
