“At the top of my struggling / there was a door,” begins the epigraph – from a Louise Glück poem – in Phoebe Stuckes’s debut novel. Set within the aftermath of an assault at a celebration, leaving the e-book’s protagonist “adorned with floral bruises”, as if she had “crawled via the woods”, the slim however searing Lifeless Animals appears to be like for an outlet for pent-up rage.
Stuckes’s story slots fairly neatly into the so-called “unhappy lady novel” class (during which usually privileged ladies face psychological well being crises – see Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Yr of Relaxation and Leisure). It follows an unnamed waitress at a slick west London restaurant, jaded beneath its “brutal regime”, who relays her story with a glacial impassiveness, brisk sentences heaped collectively breathlessly with out punctuation.
However not like many “unhappy lady” characters, Stuckes’s narrator isn’t prosperous: the novel stresses the wealth hole between her and her friends and the dismal circumstances of her bedsit. Her simmering hatred after the opening disaster, an occasion as nebulous because the sense of menace lurking in her “peripheral imaginative and prescient”, manifests as a literal and metaphorical illness. She pukes, is riddled with aches and pains, and after “hacking” uncontrollably, her employers dismiss her.
Lifeless Animals’ theme of illness additionally has a supernatural bent. When the narrator’s life collides with Helene, the ex-girlfriend of her attacker, a sequence of unusual occasions take maintain: mould invades surfaces with inconceivable velocity; crockery smashes of its personal accord. Helene and the narrator’s trauma turns into the spine of a turbo-charged, usually poisonous, romantic relationship, strengthened by a pact for revenge.
A four-time winner of the Foyle younger poets award, Stuckes crafts a barbed character research, addressing the unease of current within the feminine physique, the “lack of humanity” of the gig economic system and the numbness that follows trauma. Solely its denouement feels unsteady, the end result of its occult leanings snuffed out in a single blow. Towards a backdrop of wider violence towards ladies, it ponders vital questions round the place the anguish after male aggression is meant to be vented – and the way.
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