BOOK REVIEW -DEAD RELATIVES BY LUCIE MCKNIGHT HARDY

22/10/2021

HORROR FICTION REVIEW DEAD RELATIVES BY LUCIE MCKNIGHT HARDY

The stories within confirm her as a master of characterisation and prose, and a writer unafraid to confront the darker side of what it means to live in the UK in the 21st Century. And it makes me incredibly excited to see whatever she writes next.

“It is dark like tar when I open my eyes and I wonder for a moment if I have truly opened them, or whether I am still asleep. I blink a few times, but nothing changes; there is no confirmation from my surroundings whether I am awake or asleep, or, for that matter, alive or dead. Then I hear the first familiar flutter and I know I am both alive and awake.”

Lucie McKnight Hardy’s debut novel Water Shall Refuse Them (2019) was an indie hit and immediately established Hardy as an exciting new voice in literary horror, effortlessly combining folk horror motifs with well-observed family drama. Dead Relatives (2021) is McKnight Hardy’s debut short story collection, and confirms her as a key voice in modern horror fiction. The stories collected here display McKnight Hardy’s ability to find the horror in the domestic and everyday, the macabre and the mad hiding beneath the surface of family normality. They show her exercising her modern gothic talents to the fullest, and provide tantalising hints for where she might be heading next as a writer.

The other stories in the collection are significantly shorter, and many have appeared in venues such as Black Static , The Shadow Booth and Nightjar Press. Many of the stories show McKnight Hardy exploring her fascination with dysfunctional families to just as striking effect. Much of what makes these stories so chilling is the way that the horror stems from characters being trapped in realistic, well-observed unhappy relationships, with the supernatural or the horrific slowly encroaching on this all-too-believable recognisable situation. McKnight Hardy expertly dissects the unease of modern family life, and engages with the grisly spectre of tragedy that lurks behind every parent’s fears for their loved ones. ‘Jutland’ follows a harried and exhausted housewife, struggling with post-natal depression and her oblivious artist husband. ‘Resting Bitch Face’ similarly focuses on a woman who is pushed past the limits by her family. ‘Cortona’ sees a woman return to a holiday destination that ended in tragedy, whilst ‘The Devil of Timanfaya’ and ‘Cavities’ bring us to the brink of family tragedy from the perspective of characters who don’t understand what they are seeing until it’s too late.

McKnight Hardy’s stories identify grief as a key theme of horror. Many of these stories are built around a catastrophic loss, one that forever warps the perception of the characters involved. McKnight Hardy shows us the estranging power of grief in a number of effective ways. ‘Badgerface’, an exploration of alienation in a small town, reveals the loss that haunts its characters right at the end, the tragic unintended consequence of trying to keep face in a place where everyone knows everyone else’s business. The jet black humour of ‘The Pickling Jar’ revolves around a seemingly innocuous small town ritual for honouring the dead that becomes truly stomach-churning once you realise what it is. ‘The Birds of Nagasaki’, the devastating final story in the collection, is a tale of childhood cruelty come back to roost that expertly builds towards its grim conclusion.

Perhaps my favourite story in the whole collection, and the most unusual, is ‘Wretched’, previously collected in the Comma Press anthology The New Abject (2020). Unusually for McKnight Hardy, this story is speculative fiction, and imagines a ghastly dystopian Britain not far removed from our own, in which people’s fates are decided by government rating, and a new underclass of the Wretched has emerged, people whose ratings are too low to get any kind of job, who have their faces surgically removed and are hunted by government employees. An absolutely damning dissection of the brutal dehumanisation of the poor, working class and unemployed in modern Britain, the story is tense, compelling and uncomfortably easy to imagine happening. A grim and disturbing masterpiece, and one that makes me wish McKnight Hardy would write more speculative fiction.

McKnight Hardy’s Dead Relatives is essential reading for anyone who enjoyed Water Shall Refuse Them, and anyone in general with a taste for the more literary side of horror. The stories within confirm her as a master of characterisation and prose, and a writer unafraid to confront the darker side of what it means to live in the UK in the 21st Century. And it makes me incredibly excited to see whatever she writes next.

DEAD RELATIVES BY LUCIE MCKNIGHT HARDY
review by TONY JONES

Thirteen uncanny short stories which beautifully
tap unto everyday anxieties and undiagnosed fears

Back in 2019 I was greatly impressed by Lucie McKnight Hardy’s debut novel and gave it a stellar review over at the Ink Heist site. Follow the link should you want to read more about her startlingly original take on Folk Horror, Water Shall Refuse Them

Since then, Lucie has featured on Ginger Nuts of Horror a couple of times and you can read our 2019 interview

Much more recently Lucie was part of a GNOH panel which broadly discussed the ‘uncanny’ where she and other authors shoot the breeze on writing this type of fiction for a book edited by Dan Coxon Writing the Uncanny: Essays on Crafting Strange Fiction. This fascinating piece can be found here and is worth dipping into should you intend to read this collection as it digs into her thought process and what she is trying to achieve with her writing.

Dead Relatives features thirteen short stories, the centrepiece, the 81-page novella, the self-titled Dead Relatives is closest in style and content to her novel Water Shall Refuse Them and is amongst the strongest pieces in the collection. Eight stories have been previously published in magazines such as Black Static and The New Abject, the rest are making their print debut. Hardy’s highly original debut was hard to categorise and was a strange blend of Folk Horror and coming-of-age story, the same could be said of Dead Relatives which is closer to the traditional horror stories than most of the others. Don’t expect blood, guts and monsters, these stories are much subtler, featuring strange snapshots in time, lonely people, troubled children, marital problems or unsettling moments in time with the reader being dropped into peculiar circumstances. Welcome to the world of the uncanny!

Dead Relatives was a stellar opening which sets the bar very high and although it did not make perfect sense was a tale which gets under the skin. Iris is a young teenager living in a remote house which looks after pregnant women who want rid of their babies, but also has a succession of relatives (who are dead) staying in the house for unspecified periods. Both occurrences are relatively normal to Iris who enjoys meeting her dead relatives. Perhaps I missed something, but the ‘Dead Relatives’ lurked and added little to the story, but on the other hand the other hand the troubled pregnant women seen through the eyes of Iris made it a captivating read. Nothing is not quite as it seems and the two threads intertwine in a tale which captures the loneliness and isolation which is a theme in many of the stories.

This was a bleak eclectic collection which gives both uncanny and uneasy twists to everyday occurrences and small things which might tip us over the edge. Normally I read collections quite slowly, but I sped through Dead Relatives and was greatly impressed by the range, even if I felt a few were underdeveloped, there really was not much to Parroting for example. All the narratives are female driven, revolving around subjects as diverse and mundane as marital problems, bullying, the strains of young children and the stresses which life can bring. Jutland features a young mother on holiday with her family, feeling both the pressures of her career and problems relating to the health of her son. This was one of those stories which at first glance did not seem to be about very much, but beneath the surface the cracks were beginning to show, closing with a brutal final paragraph. There are cracked psyches throughout the collection.

Bullying is a theme which pops up in several stories, in The Birds of Nagasaki a younger sister has a spectacular revenge on her nasty elder brother after he destroys one of her favourite possessions, make sure you hang on for the killer ending. Resting Bitch Face has a wicked level of black humour when a ground down housewife gets some seriously payback on her abusive husband. Cavities looks at school bullying and the profound long-term psychological effects it has on a woman who visits the dentist for the first time in many years, bringing back painful memories.

The great Roald Dahl himself would have been proud of The Pickling Jar in which we realise a peculiar village community does something very special with their dead. This one kept me on tender-hooks until the first mouthful! In Wretched Hardy tries her hand at dystopian fiction and although it is brimming with fascinating ideas I struggled to make sense of some of it, but it has the potential for further development into a longer story or novella.

Two stories were set in locations I had previously visited on holiday. Cortona is an amazing Italian medieval Italian town, and as much as I loved the location the story passed me by. However, The Devil of Timanfaya was considerably more striking and the author had obviously been on the same tour of the volcanic area of Lanzarote as myself, as I vividly recalled the hot stones and craters, almost moon like, terrain she describes. Central character Tessa is distracted by her local surroundings, her holiday home and perhaps her husband also. Like many of the characters in this collection, she suffers from low level anxiety which is hard to describe and becomes unsettled by a figure she believes is following her from a distance and is threatened in some undiagnosed way.

In describing what the ‘uncanny’ actually is, this is what Hardy said in her 2021 feature on GNOH:

“For me, it’s that sense that something is not quite right with a situation, but it might be difficult to define exactly what has made the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. A creeping sense of unease that increases in intensity. There doesn’t necessarily have to be any sort of climax for something to be uncanny – rather, the opposite.” […] “Very simply, it gives you the opportunity to explore your own fears. Writing the Uncanny lets you venture into the dark spaces you might otherwise avoid – some people might say it’s cathartic.”

These comments nicely sum up what you can expect from Dead Relatives, even the stories I have been critical of have their merits, peculiarities and are worthwhile reading experiences. The beauty of a strong collection is the reader is left wondering what to expect from the next story, or the sense of dread for the impending ending, or the sheer sense or ordinariness many of the stories featured until something uncanny or peculiar bubbled to the surface. Hardy mentions in the GNOH feature that triggering a reaction in readers is of key importance to her and many of these startling stories are guaranteed to do that.

Tony Jones

Dead Relatives Paperback
by Lucie McKnight Hardy

Iris has never left the big house in the country she shares with Mammy and the servants. When The Ladies arrive, she finds that she must appease her dead relatives. Other stories in this collection explore themes of motherhood and the fragile body, family dynamics and small town tensions, unusual traditions and metamorphosis. Dead Relatives and Other Stories is the highly anticipated, no-holds-barred short story collection from Lucie McKnight Hardy, and readers can expect more of the suspense and trepidation evident in her debut novel, Water Shall Refuse Them. Not for the faint-hearted, Dead Relatives invites you behind closed doors, and will leave you wondering if it’s better that they’re kept shut and firmly locked.