Readers have been primed to expect unsoftened shocks and gleeful transgression from Eliza Clark. Her debut Boy Parts, a “BookTok” sensation, was a tale of degradation, gender and trauma, using a risk-taking photographer who demeans her young male subjects to distort the line between abuser and victim. Penance, her follow-up, was similarly no-holds-barred, exploring the ethics of fiction while revolving around a journalist and his subject: a group of teen girls who murdered a classmate.
Clark’s first story collection, She’s Always Hungry, offers smaller slices of punchy, funny, unapologetically perturbing fiction. True to its title, it deals with consumption in every sense, grappling with how capitalism, consumerism, food marketing and the beauty sphere feed into one another. The opening story, Build a Body Like Mine, tackles the topic of eating disorders sardonically in the style of an advertisement for a wondrous weight-loss hack. Nestled into its mockingly bravura passages are moments of shiver-inducing reflection. Looking in the mirror after dieting, the narrator confesses: “I failed to recognise her as my best self. I thought she was nothing like a real girl. I thought she looked like something a pervert imagined.”
Vaulting deftly between different genres, tones and universes, Clark has a sharp knack for parody. The sinister mystery of The Shadow of Little Chitaly (a Chinese-Italian fusion restaurant) unravels entirely through the medium of clipped, absurdist Just Eat reviews. Hollow Bones is a dizzying sci-fi in which a “thick vein” pulses in the ceiling of the spaceship where the protagonist is confined. The eerie title story takes place in a matriarchal fishing village, where men – convolutedly called “Mary’s Samuel”, “Kitty’s John”, “Betty Hardy’s David” etc. – are named after their mothers, responsible for keeping their masculine behaviours in check.
The visceral quality of Clark’s writing binds these stories together, sharing a taste for queasy horror and delighting in discomfort. Some are less full-bodied – in The Problem Solver, Clark’s unalleviated unsubtlety feels slightly on-the-nose, while Nightstalkers falls short of poignant, meaningful drama. An apocalyptic tendency looms over the collection, none more so than in the caustically wry The King: a flesh-eating being slyly disguised as a human greedily awaits doomsday. Ruthless, untempered and relishing in society’s “sickness”, despite its weaker points this is a collection easily devoured.
