A clue – and more than a clue – to the nature of Rose Keating’s aesthetic can be found in the title of the fourth story included in Oddbody, her debut collection: Bela Lugosi Isn’t Dead. If you know your subcultural history, you will be aware that Bela Lugosi’s Dead is the title of the 1979 Bauhaus song that originated Goth Rock.
The lyric “[F]lowers/bereft in deathly bloom” gives a fair sample of the foundational Goth vibe. A certain quality of deadpan camp; a theatrical morbidity; flowers, graveyards, bats at twilight, love lies bleeding; a sonic landscape of skeletal post-punk rattle and boom. The Goths – late descendants of the 19th-century decadent movement – are still with us: street romantics of lace, leather and eyeliner, here to remind us that life and death are, if they’re anything, aesthetic phenomena.
Bela Lugosi, in full Dracula drag, duly appears, undead, in Bela Lugosi Isn’t Dead. Bela, or his cinematic ghost, is the intimate companion or pet of a 14-year-old girl, Saoirse. “We’re sick,” Bela tells Saoirse, in the story’s opening lines, as they wake up in her bedroom. Mam bustles in: “Up.” Bela disports himself, bursts, stinks, transforms into a bat. Mam doesn’t bat an eyelid (sorry) until, halfway through the story, she finally says, “I think this needs to stop […] I remember what this was like, at your age […] But Saoirse, I’m sorry. It’s not healthy. He is bad for you.”
A stricken teenage girl haunted by the ghost of Bela Lugosi-as-Dracula; the whole thing treated, by every character, with imperturbable matter-of-factness, as if it’s an accepted part of life, of growing up. The suggestion – via mention of the “overexposed” photo of Dad that “Mum keeps on the mantlepiece” – that Bela is the externalisation of unmanageable feelings: grief, adolescent malaise, adolescent morbidity. The story is deadpan, even as more death (in this case of Saoirse’s cat, Ginger) obtrudes, even as Bela guides Saoirse towards fantasies of resurrection and repair. Or are they, in fact, realities?
Bela Lugosi Isn’t Dead is a neat example of Keating’s deadpan expressionism. The title story, Oddbody, works similarly. A second-person protagonist is followed around, haunted, hectored, entertained, by a ghost; in the world of this story, having a ghost is normal, if socially fraught, like being depressed, or – another possible metaphor here – being on your period. “Did you bring your ghost to my flat?” asks the protagonist’s unpleasant boyfriend, Ben. “Do you have any idea how inappropriate that is?”
The ghost urges “you” to consider suicide; viciously criticises “your” body (“Look at the bulging waves of cellulite rippling across the inner thighs”); is, nonetheless, familiar, even beloved. The tightness of its embrace “feels so very much like being held”.
It should by now be obvious that Keating isn’t just a prose Goth. Her stories draw on another powerful tributary – specifically, feminist arguments about the fates of the female body under patriarchy. The ghost, in Oddbody, sounds like depression – and the story works beautifully as a dark and funny account of that state.
But equally, the ghost sounds like the messages that patriarchy whispers and shouts to women. “It’s not a bad ghost,” the protagonist insists to Ben, “I’m fine, really.” At one point, “the ghost has given in to diffusion”. It’s everywhere – like depression; like a ruling ideology.
Expressionism – see Kafka – works by literalising emotional states or political ideas. The 10 stories in Oddbody are all expressionist in this sense. In the funniest story, Squirm, a young woman named Laura is taking care of her father; her father, formerly human, is now a large segmented worm who lives in a soil-filled bath. Nobody in the story thinks this is strange. “Is there something wrong with him?” asks Liam, a man Laura meets on a fetish website. “He’s a worm,” Laura replies. Liam, driving them through the countryside, says, “Look, sheep.”
In Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa’s family suffers social embarrassment at the fact that Gregor is now an insect; Keating riffs on this surrealist insight to tell startling, funny, alarming stories about what happens to our feelings when they collide with the social world, and about how that social world can mould our feelings, especially if we are women. #
[ Short stories from Kafka to the Kafkaesque: making strange againOpens in new window ]
In Next to Cleanliness, a young woman undergoes a “cleanse” supervised by a charismatic doctor; it strips her down to her skeleton. In Eggshells, women lay literal eggs; it is a social faux pas to lay one at work.
The stories in Oddbody are superbly crafted – though they might perhaps best be read one at a time (a certain sameness is detectable if you read them one after the other). The prose is confident, witty and perceptive. These are sharp and memorable horror stories about the most ordinary horrors: having a body; having a heart; being a woman in the 21st-century West.
Kevin Power is assistant professor of English at Trinity College Dublin
