Disgust and delight, it has been said, live in close proximity; in Eliza Clark’s debut collection, they share a home and a bed. These 11 stories revolve around food, sex, gender, power and the body; they veer from realism to sci-fi, fairytale, horror and post-apocalyptic dystopia. This is a book that seems crafted from the stuff of our deepest fears and our most illicit desires. You read on, by turns engrossed and grossed out, as though in the thrall of some demonic power.
In one story, a tapeworm finds a happy home in the narrator’s belly, eating her dinners and keeping her weight in check (“Find me deliciously thin at a Michelin star restaurant, devouring a tasting menu with a wasp waist, never loosening my belt”). Another narrator’s pubescent face, blighted with acne, melts and scabs over after an aggressive treatment found on the dark web. “I feel like I’m touching raw meat and I pull my hands away.” In the sci-fi story Hollow Bones, a rip in the spacesuit of a scientist studying alien cultures allows a luminescent parasite to burrow into her thigh; bizarrely, she eats her own finger as it breaks off after prodding the wound (“The skin of that finger was so thin, it fell apart like stewed meat and slid down her throat just as easily, gristle collapsing with a press of her tongue, and the bone crumbling between her teeth”). The tale ends in her leg and forearm being amputated by a surgical team of fanged and furry creatures. Clark is a bona-fide queen of body horror, sadistic in her choice of imagery, and cussedly attentive to that most mundane and yet consequential of facts: that we have and are a body and, as a result, are always at risk of injury and mutation.
Boy Parts, Clark’s debut novel, was a BookTok sensation. A darkly hilarious study of gender archetypes and the treacherous schism between art and porn, consent and coercion, it featured a Geordie dominatrix and fetish photographer who, in the name of her vocation, groomed, snapped and possibly also bludgeoned and killed men she picked up from the streets. Her follow-up, Penance, turned a sly gaze on true crime, reconstructing the immolation of a teenager by three of her schoolmates. The preoccupations and self-awareness of these novels percolate into the story collection, but it is also very much its own thing: the tales ranging from quiet and murky to freaky, surreal and outright absurd, the work of a writer both dealing in and surpassing abjection and taboos.
Goth GF, a workplace comedy with sub-dom elements, reads like a winking recapitulation of Boy Parts, while The Problem Solver, about a rape survivor who confides in a male friend, engages themes of women’s testimony, male saviorism and sexual gaslighting. As ever, Clark manages to draw blood with a prop knife. After the woman half-jokes about the point of the Sex Offenders Register, the friend earnestly proposes the following course of action: “You wouldn’t have to call him out on your account,” he says. “In fact, we could do it like … more like a whisper network. Or I could message my friend from that feminist book club, the one with all the Instagram followers. Get them to name and shame him.”
The title story, set within a matriarchal community with strict rules for its men – fishers vulnerable to the dark call of the sea – is a delectable, code-scrambled mermaid tale that plays with ideas about male and female power (“The machinations of men had done so little for this place, and for the world outside of here”) and adds a mischievous twist to notions of communal safety and female self-sacrifice. It comes swaddled in influences, from Andersen’s fairytale to Orkney folklore and Lovecraftian mythos (there’s a Lovecraftian nod, too, in the following tale The Shadow Over Little Chitaly, composed entirely of reviews of a mysterious Chinese-Italian fusion takeaway).
The King satirises the “femgore” subgenre with which Clark has been identified, dramatising its excesses while relishing its cliches. Told from the uproarious viewpoint of a cannibal goddess who rises to power after the apocalypse, ruling over a settlement she christens Dad City in honour of the father she has killed and devoured, the story is a litany of horrors leavened by sick humour. She says of a man who offers himself up to be eaten: “He wants me to cut off his dick and balls before he goes. The dick-and-balls thing – they never enjoy that as much as they think they will. It’s always such a let-down for them. It’s a little sad.”
Two stories, Extinction Event and Nightstalkers, may feel like interlopers. The first is a miniature eco-thriller about an alien species of air- and sea-purifying starfish, and the second a hallucinogenic portrait of queer longing in 1970s California. Clark, you realise, isn’t a writer who will keep very long to any one path. This collection, full of shock and surprises, filth and wonder, is occasionally hard to reckon with, but harder still to forget.
• She’s Always Hungry by Eliza Clark is published by Faber (£9.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
