Dead Relatives by Lucie McKnight Hardy
Review by Cath Barton
In a collection of short stories exploring family ties and tensions, numbed feelings and myriad fears, Lucie McKnight Hardy makes the reader shudder with the kind of delight that Roald Dahl invoked Tales of the Unexpected, glad that this is the world of the imagination, not our real lives. And yet, she does not invoke a fantasy world, but the dark side of the one in which we live, just stretched a bit further than any of us wish to experience.
The stories in Dead Relatives are sensual and earthy, tales of folk horror in the same tradition as McKnight Hardy’s debut novel Water Shall Refuse Them. The settings vary: as the cobbled streets of an apparently-idyllic village in southern Italy in ‘Cortona’; an urban environment in Britain in the not-too-distant future suffused with hopelessness in ‘Wretched’; an aquarium in a decaying seaside resort on an Atlantic shore in ‘The Puckering’: What the stories have in common is an understanding of the fragility of human relationships and of life itself. Black humour, as in the local tradition after a death described in ‘The Pickling Jar’, and a woman’s revenge on her mouthy husband in ‘Resting Bitch Face’, leavens the mix but does not dilute the power of this writer’s ability to make her readers gasp as they laugh.
While set in our world, the plots of these stories are driven by something ancient and unknowable, and McKnight Hardy knows when and just how much to use specific details to ramp up tension, such as the buzzing of pylons in ‘Badgerface’ that prefigures subsequent events, and the motif of the doll in the title story. These are tales in which there is silence between people, and what isn’t said is as important as what is. This is done particularly effectively through the unspeaking child and the unspoken fears of her mother in ‘Jutland’, combined with its bleak setting in ‘the final house in the village’; the reader knows that this will not end well, but not how or when.
Birds recur. The chickens in ‘Chooks Don’t Have Teeth’, the pair of pigeon chicks in a flowerpot in ‘Cortona’ and the old lady’s parrot in ‘Parroting’ are all totemic, their mysterious and unknowable lives linked inextricably with the mystery of death. In the final story of the collection, ‘The Birds of Nagasaki’, the birds are cranes embroidered on a kimono coveted by the narrator, or fashioned as origami. The end of this tale neatly mirrors that of the first in the collection, the title story, with its natural burial chamber.
There is something very unnatural about these tales, none more so than that title story, in which McKnight Hardy uses an expanded form — at 66 pages, almost a quarter of the book — that gives her space for a satisfyingly slow build to the full revelation of what is going on in a remote house where women sit out the final months of socially unacceptable pregnancies. The story draws on the tropes of folk horror — a group of people in a remote rural setting, a pushback on the notion that rural living is idyllic and questionable practices that result from extreme isolation — but the author makes them her own. The narrator, Iris, aged thirteen, has never left the grounds of the country house with its peeling paint where she lives with her mother, a cook and a handyman. Her companions are painted and stuffed, but, for Iris at least, they continue to have life. As Iris says when a conversation with one of the pregnant guests begins to disturb her: ‘Now the hair on the back of my neck starts to bristle, and this makes me think of the pike up in its case on the landing, its fins twitching.’
Only occasionally does McKnight Hardy miss a beat — she perhaps overloads one or two of her shorter stories with detail. But more importantly, the range of this author’s imagination and her deceptively comfortable prose style take the stories in Dead Relatives well beyond the confines of genre fiction.
Dead Relatives is published by Dead Ink, 21st October 2021