Note: We read this book as an advanced review copy (ARC) given to our parent companies, everafterbooks.uk and theubergroup.org.
Content warning: This review quotes and discusses examples of body horror. If this isn't your thing, you may not way to read further.
The coolest thing I noticed about Irish author Neil Sharpson's folk horror novel The Burial Tide was the delightfully grotesque and innovative scenes of literary body horror (moderate spoilers follow).
As an amateur creature designer, I am used to combining disparate human and animal anatomical elements for either a creep or a cute factor, sometimes both. Call me Dr. Frankenstein! Sharpson's descriptions are so visceral and clear, I could draw these creatures in my sketchbook.
Welcome to Innishbannock, a somewhat blasted island off the coast of Kerry. The skies are possibly the gloomiest in all of Ireland, and so are the inhabitants who are locked in centuries of hatred. These are village feuds on steroids.
The book opens as a woman, who has been buried alive, struggles to free herself from her own coffin, bloodying her knuckles and breaking her toes. This is a desperate fight for survival. Ever since I read Poe's Cask of Amontillado as a child, I have been terrified of being interred while not quite deceased. The Victorians used to put bells on a string which the poor unfortunate individual could ring from the grave. With wind being a variable, cremation for me please.
When the buried woman finally frees herself with the help of a massive storm that has loosened the heavy soil pressing down on her, she has no recollection of who she is and how she came to be lying in an unmarked grave next to three other unmarked graves.
When she stumbles into town, ravenous, she breaks into the cottage of Declan, a poet in residence on the island. This is not your regular zombie story, so she isn't going to dig through someone's skull to get to the gooey goodies, but she does raid the refrigerator. Declan finds her and calls Dr. Helen Quinn, the island's only doctor.
Dr. Quinn informs the revenant of her past, her husband, and her deceased mother's name. The only problem is that none of this feels right to Mara. The name perhaps belongs to her, but everything else seems fake.
Declan believes Mara is being lied to. The pair meet Natalie, a barkeeper in the tourist town of Farvey, which is quite separate from the traditional village. The trio seeks to uncover the mystery of Mara's identity. The more they dig, the more they uncover, the deeper the mystery goes.
In one scene, an unfortunate island resident seeks to remove hideous growths with a pair of garden shears. Understandably, the man wishes to keep his humanity and resists his own tragic metamorphosis.
"It was the realization that some of the growths had bones in them. The biggest one actually gave the shears some trouble, the bone was so thick. He could feel the weight of them as they tumbled down his back after each one was cut…"
It is no secret that gross things often happen in horror movie bathrooms. Think of the bloodbath Beverly endures in It and the decrepit grinning woman behind the bathroom curtain in The Shining. We've always felt vulnerable, exposed in our nakedness before the mirror in a tiled room where our blood would be easier to mop up.
In the quote above, we feel the heaviness of these living tumors as they thud moistly to the floor. We also suspect that these protrusions will grow again, perhaps making this exercise futile.
In one scene, when Declan is acting as a lookout for Mara and Natalie, he encounters a grotesque being who radiates an ancient hatred. A wizened female creature curls her serpentine lower half around a tree, watching and waiting.
"There was a woman, or rather half a woman. The top half of her body was naked. Long wisps of filthy silver hair grew from her head and trailed all the way down to her waist, where her body ceased the pretense of humanity. The lower half of her body was a massive fleshy phallus, thick and prehensile and the color of spoiled milk. He could see dark veins pulsing under the translucent flesh. She was coiled around the tree like a serpent and fixed him with eyes that spoke of a furious terror. She seemed mad with fear, her lips trembling and her tongue dancing in her skull, making a wet tapping noise as it hit the roof of her mouth."
As an artist I have a brilliantly clear description of a female monster, who is half phallus, and that spoiled-milk colored appendage is prehensile in a Freudian serpent kind of way. I can even hear the "wet tapping noise." Fortunately, I cannot smell her, because I think I would faint from olfactory overload.
In good horror creature design, the viewer isn't just afraid of the image, they feel sorry for the monster. I think it is impossible not to feel for the creatures in movies and literature because there is most usually an element of anguish that is unearned, a type of hell we wouldn't wish on our worst enemy.
In the next section, a hapless man is transforming into an organism that is only part human. A mouth opens in his side as if he is birthing something new and terrifying. Whether the man in question is likeable or not, the reader will feel horror and, yes, pity for his ordeal.
"And then the seams pulled apart and a great maw opened in his side and he screamed and screamed as he saw teeth, rows and rows of razor-sharp baby teeth. The massive shark mouth in his side snapped shut."
The grossest things I've done in a bathroom are change a yellow, pustulent surgical dressing and lance a juicy boil on a (good) friend's posterior. This scene is worse than any possible human activity in the throne room.
The mention of sharpened baby teeth completes the picture of a nascent life-form coming into being and is reminiscent of alien young bursting forth from rib cages, screeching into the world. Here he places the word baby, which is emblematic of innocence with "razor-sharp," a terrifying perversion of the natural order, as are all monsters.
Sharpson's expert description of body horror reminds me of Carpenter's The Thing; humanity in a tooth and nail battle to remain human. This is betrayal by the human body writ large in horror. It gets at the fear we all have regarding disease and our inevitable decline. Horror speaks to the truths we feel and magnifies them. Perhaps seeing this amplified makes the actuality less frightening.
Come visit Innishbannock with its creepy beasties! If you enjoy inventive body horror that is as ingenious as it is disgusting, you will love Sharpson's writing as much as I do.