Julia Armfield’s first book, a collection of stories called Salt Slow, set out a method. Choose a quotidian phenomenon – problem skin, say, or sleeplessness – and use it as a foundation stone for relentlessly logical, haunted edifices reminiscent of the contemporary gothic of Mariana Enríquez or Guadalupe Nettel. So a convent schoolgirl with problem skin, always shedding and peeling, undergoes a metamorphosis; or a town fills with Sleeps, each having stepped out of its owner “like a passenger from a railway carriage”. It is tricky to describe what happens without giving away the endings – which, when you become used to her method, are often prefigured in the beginnings, and in the classical tales her literalism both defamiliarises and renews: wolf-siblings, maenads, a gorgon. The effect is only heightened by a deliberate, vivid realism of place (Newport, Manchester, Glasgow; rented flats, bars in university towns) and a discerning interest in the shifting power structures of relationships.
