Modern horror writing at its best

I want to write a little bit about two recent book releases that share some thematic crossover and urge you to check them out. Both books are remarkable pieces of writing and deserve a wide audience. A fair warning: the books deal with gnarly subjects and this piece references them throughout, so if you’re put off by mentions of grief, illness, gore and the like… read no further. No spoilers, however.

In Phengaris, we meet 17-year old Mark, a young man adrift. He is looking after his terminally ill mum, a parent with whom his relationship is conflicted to say the least, his dad disappeared years ago, and all Mark really wants to do is get high and tune out of the relentless noise of his life. He thinks he’s found the perfect spot in nearby Thurstrop Wood and an abandoned workshop yard. Unfortunately for Mark, something no longer human there has seen him and doesn’t want to let him go.

Phengaris opens with a visceral description of a body mutilated by disease and something disturbingly unnatural. It sets the tone for what follows, as Mark becomes consumed by the mystery of Thurstrop Wood and how it connects to his family, revealing secrets that have been buried for years. There’s other things buried in the woods, too, and they are coming to the surface. Orridge writes with skill and empathy about the burden of youth, and of illness, and about the unforgiving way bodies attack themselves at the same time as the world around us weighs down on us. There’s a thread of ecological awareness, too, and a focus on the nature of parasitical behaviour.

It’s also concerned with what it means to be human, and how family connections not even escapable by death bond us together for good and for ill. Orridge has a beautiful way with phrasing and illuminates the secondary and minor characters in a way that brings them vividly to life. Sadness and melancholy and loss knot their way through Phengaris, as does a quietly effective rage. It’s ambitious, passionately alive, and makes the personal deeply political.

Fleischerei by Saoirse Ní Chiaragáin has some complimentary themes but is a radically different experience. In it, we are introduced to Órfhlaith, living in Berlin and working as a content moderator. Órfhlaith is a bloody ball of grief, guilt and self-loathing, punishing and exciting herself with masochistic fantasies. When she moves their focus onto her sickly, compellingly unreadable colleague Arnaud, the wall between her interior darkness and the world around her unravels. As their romance develops, they find in each other a shared yearning for emotional dislocation and physical mutilation. Órfhlaith just wants to know Arnaud, but is it ever really possible to know someone else, no matter how much a part of you they become?

This is a troubling, affecting work. Intimacy throughout is a transgression that leads to violence and permanent scarring. It’s a confrontingly visceral book and will make you look at the concept of ‘meat’ substantially differently afterwards. It is also fearless about making bodies and consumption and grief defiantly, unapologetically political and challenging us to think about what that means.

Fleischerei is putrid as it builds its grotesque concoction of smells, tastes, sensations and consumption. It’s about the interior as pungent reflection of what is outside of us, what is done to us. Again, this is a book concerned with what makes us human and what it is to be human, and offers no easy answers, preferring instead challenges to expected narrative conventions. An unrelentingly brave, compassionate work of art.

Phengaris and Fleischerei are both outstanding, personal, feminine, bleakly beautiful works of modern horror writing at its best. I highly recommend you experience them.