ABSORBED BY KYLIE WHITEHEAD (BOOK REVIEW)

17/6/2021

Part of what makes Absorbed so striking is Whitehead’s seamless mixing of frankly told lived reality and the uncanny. The novel’s subtlety is part of what makes it so disturbing.

ABSORBED BY KYLIE WHITEHEAD (BOOK REVIEW by Jonathan Thornton)

“I’d always thought it odd that people talked of love as something light and fluffy, a fairy-tale ending. For me, love had always been aggressive, a battle to balance wanting and being wanted. Would he be inside me now, if I had not loved with such violence? Would I change that if I could?”

Kylie Whitehead’s debut novel Absorbed is a powerful and disturbing work of literary horror. The book merges candid reflections on modern female anxiety with gruesome body horror to create a haunting fever dream of a novel. Whitehead’s narrative voice is remarkably assured, and she expertly walks the line between thoughtful character moments and razor-sharp tension. Absorbed is the first release from New Ruins, a new collaborative project between indie titans Dead Ink and Influx Press that focuses on works that sit somewhere in the borderlands between literary and genre fiction. Whitehead’s novel is an excellent example of this compelling form of modern fiction that all too often does not easily find a home in the category-obsessed world of publishing. If Absorbed is indicative of the kind of work we can expect from New Ruins, lovers of literary horror and the Weird have a lot to look forward to.

Allison and Owen have been dating for ten years, since they met at university. However Allison fears that Owen is growing away from her, and whilst they are making love, she accidentally absorbs him into herself. She wakes the next day to discover that she is starting to display all of Owen’s best qualities, becoming the self-confident person she always wished she was. But soon Allison’s old insecurities start to return. There is a presence in her flat in the place of Owen, and something is moving inside her. Allison has to figure out what’s happening to her body before events spiral out of her control.

Absorbed is at its heart a powerful exploration of the pressures facing a modern couple, and the dangers of losing your own identity in another person. Whitehead unflinchingly lays bare all of Allison’s insecurities, and so exposes the toxicity hidden at the heart of the ideal of the modern relationship. Allison is someone who has built her entire identity around being Owen’s girlfriend, and even before she absorbs him she is finding it a restrictive and frustrating role to play. Her jealousy has made her unable to bond with other women, and her insecurities have made her so inward-facing that even her closest friends find her selfish and unengaging. Terrified of Owen leaving her for someone smarter, sexier, more fun, she is caught in a vicious circle of self-hatred and jealousy that is destroying her ability to relate to other people. Owen’s creative, freelance job is supported by Allison’s dreary council job, leading to Owen flourishing whilst Allison’s creative ambitions to be a writer atrophy and die. Whitehead expertly explores how Allison’s own personal insecurities and the expectations placed on young couples by society have combined to turn her life into a living hell. The ideals of love, romance and sex that Allison has been sold as a young person do not live up to the reality of compromise involved in an adult relationship. Allison’s desperate need to own Owen completely, to know absolutely that he loves her as much as she loves him, turns into something frightening and monstrous as she consumes him.

Whitehead is also interested in the full complexity of the human need to be loved. Consuming Owen is not enough for Allison. Upon absorbing him, she pursues equally obsessive and destructive relationships with Helena, the woman she assumed Owen was cheating on her with, and Jean, a mother figure at Allison’s work. In order to feel fully human, being the perfect girlfriend isn’t enough, and Allison begins to feel the same ferocious need for female friendship and a mother/daughter relationship, all of which become subsumed in a miasma of lust, longing and need. At the end of the day, Allison’s other human relationships she finds equally complicated by her own insecurities and society’s expectations of how a woman should behave to her friends and her parents. Whatever the social interaction, there is no escaping the brutally demanding requirements of being female.

Part of what makes Absorbed so striking is Whitehead’s seamless mixing of frankly told lived reality and the uncanny. The novel’s subtlety is part of what makes it so disturbing. Allison’s absorption of Owen is something that happens in private between two people at their most intimate, leaving both Allison and the reader uncertain as to what really happened. Similarly, witchcraft, the occult, Satanism and hauntings lurk in every corner of the book, make themselves felt by implication instead of being directly seen. Is Allison slowly losing her grip on reality after a traumatic breakup, or is there dark magic at work, the legacy of Allison’s birth parents, arrested on charges of Satanic abuse of the primary school they ran? Whitehead offers no easy answers, but instead rachets up the tension as the novel, and Allison’s descent into either madness or her hidden true nature, progress. In its unflinching focus on a dysfunctional relationship driven past the brink by an intrusion of the Weird, the novel is reminiscent of Kathe Koja’s classic The Cipher (1991). In its pitch-perfect melding of modern relationship dynamics with the speculative, it stands alongside Naomi Booth’s Sealed (2017). But ultimately comparing Absorbed with other works proves futile; it is a strikingly original work of literary horror. I look forward to whatever Whitehead does next, and for the next instalment from the New Ruins project.

Allison has been with Owen since university. Shes given up on writing her novel and is working a dull office job at the local council now it feels like the only interesting thing about her is that shes Owens girlfriend. But hes slipping away from her, and Allison has no idea who shell be without him. Panicking, she absorbs him... Soon Allison begins taking on Owens best qualities, becoming the person she always thought she should be. But is Owen all she needs to complete herself? Will Allison ever be a whole person?