 This story could’ve been full of schoolboy sniggering and crude gross-out humour, and it certainly does have a comic element, but it’s also a serious and moving character study of someone facing one of the most awful medical predicaments available to humanity, without ever making a victim of her or lapsing into self-indulgent doom-mongering. Philosophers have often pitted their wits against the mystery that is horror. What exactly is horror, and why do the things that scare and appal us have this effect? In the nineteenth century Freud developed the concept of the Uncanny - which can be briefly defined as the intrusion of the unfamiliar into the familiar world around us - as a model to explain human fears. Later on thinkers such as Julia Kristeva contributed the theory of the Abject, another way of approaching horror that focusses on the dividing line between the inside and the outside of the human body, and the feelings of disgust, anger and dread that arise when the substances expelled by the body refuse to just quietly disappear. Georges Bataille, meanwhile, extended the concept of the abject beyond the human and into society as a whole, as a way of critiquing the dynamics of othering, of the tensions between “us” and “them”. All these themes are more relevant than ever, and Comma Press has now followed up its 2008 anthology The New Uncanny with The New Abject: Tales of Modern Unease (edited by Sarah Eyre and Ra Page). This is the sort of book that could fuel many a high-minded philosophical line of enquiry. However, my first question on opening it was “Who’s going to do the one about shit?”. The swiftness with which this enquiry is answered is greatly to the editors’ credit: Bernardine Bishop starts the party with ‘Stool’, about the emotional turmoil of a woman fitted with a colostomy bag who is also beset by an apparently haunted toilet. Many an author would struggle to sculpt a decent story out of such dark matter, but Bishop is not just any author. Her innovative premise is decked out in style, and the descriptions of allotment plants tended by the main characters weave in and out of the narrative in a way that is surprisingly beautiful. This story could’ve been full of schoolboy sniggering and crude gross-out humour, and it certainly does have a comic element, but it’s also a serious and moving character study of someone facing one of the most awful medical predicaments available to humanity, without ever making a victim of her or lapsing into self-indulgent doom-mongering. This unusually candid portrayal of an older woman’s psyche is just the first hint of the very strong flavour of feminism that pervades the anthology. This is very fitting, since western civilisation tells women that their bodies are particularly disgusting and holds them to a higher standard of cleanliness and youthfulness than men. The beauty industry and its capacity to generate and amplify female suffering comes under attack in Lara Williams’ desperately sad “() ((“, while a women undergoing an uneasy pregnancy becomes obsessed with echoes of a subterranean body of water in “The Reservoir”, a dreamy, street-lit piece by Meave Hughey that is reminiscent of Sylvia Plath and Joel Lane by turns. And then there’s “The Universal Stain Remover” by Gaia Holmes, my favourite story in the anthology. This delve into the private life of a gold-standard professional house-sitter who specializes in leaving houses cleaner than she finds them is a veritable symphony of ground-in dirt, be it domestic, physical or psychological (surviving domestic abuse is a major theme). It notably tackles menstruation, a process that, if those sanitary towel adverts and their trickles of blue water are anything to go by, fills a certain portion of society with even more disgust than excrement or vomit. And this isn’t one of those simplistic return-of-the-repressed stories where some suburban neat-freak is merely submerged by chaos, either. The heroine has a more complex relationship with dirt than that, and the story’s most important message is the importance of identifying all the different types of filth in your life, then deciding what types of scum should be embraced and what types just need a good hard dose of Cillit Bang. It also has a very satisfying ending. A number of the tales here are oriented more toward the social abject. Saleem Haddad’s ‘An Enfleshment of Desire’ features a hero who leaves his comfortable life and long-standing boyfriend in New York to became swept up in the terrifying but euphoric Lebanese “thawra” uprising, and in the process finds himself engaging in a spot of intense philandering. This is an absorbing story with a setting that is, to say the least, unexplored by Western fantasy writers, and it was interesting to read about how homosexuality is perceived in the Lebanon. The whole thing is at times a bit self-consciously deep – it’s the kind of story where people say “Annihilate me” during sex – but overall it’s a vivid and nuanced look at how self-discovery and self-destruction often seem inseparable. Further to the West, Sarah Schofield has a political spectre from Britain in her crosshairs with ‘Rejoice’. It’s the sort of high-concept story it’s hard to describe without spoiling, so I’ll just say that it’s very effective and sinister as long as you know a little bit about UK political past. And if the country’s future is of more interest to you, look no further than “Wretched” by Lucie McKnight Hardy, a Gary McMahon-esque vision of a surveillance-sodden, post-austerity future that seems horribly close (or in fact already here if you’re poor and/or disabled.) Elsewhere we find more explorations of the way modern technology has been enlisted in the war on the Other. “It’s a Dinosauromorph, Dum-Dum” by Adam Marek addresses virtual reality and, by implication, the way the digital world and its artificial images of physical perfection are foisted on us all while the ugly, the old and the disabled become increasingly invisible. This could’ve been a very preachy number indeed but it has the brisk pacing, originality and capacity to frighten of a classic cyberpunk story. Meanwhile the rural abject is successfully invoked by two of the more “literary” authors in the anthology, Margaret Drabble (the wistful, eerie ‘The Leftovers’), and Gerard Woodward (the compelling beekeeping hipster relationship drama ‘The Honey Gatherers’). In fact, one of the things I liked best about this book is the blend of mainstream authors and genre writers. I am often underwhelmed by the attempts of literary authors to write fantasy and horror fiction - these efforts often seem watery and wrongly convinced of their own originality due to an incomplete knowledge of the genre in which they are slumming it. That’s not the case of any of the contributions here, and overall this a thoughtful but fun anthology that will hopefully unite readers from across the literary spectrum. Review by Daisy Lyle  SOMETHING HAS FALLEN AWAY. We have lost a part of ourselves, our history, what we once were. That something, when we encounter it again, look it straight in the eyes, disgusts us, makes us retch. This is the horror of the abject. Following the success of Comma’s award-winning New Uncanny anthology, The New Abject invites leading authors to respond to two parallel theories of the abject – Julia Kristeva’s theory of the psychoanalytic, intimate abject, and Georges Bataille’s societal equivalent – with visceral stories of modern unease. As we become ever-more isolated by social media bubbles, or the demands for social distancing, our moral gag-reflex is increasingly sensitised, and our ability to tolerate difference, or ‘the other’, atrophies. Like all good horror writing, these stories remind us that exposure to what unsettles us, even in small doses, is always better than pretending it doesn’t exist. After all, we can never be wholly free of that which belongs to us. FEATURING new fiction by Alan Beard, Bernardine Bishop, Ramsey Campbell, David Constantine, Margaret Drabble, Karen Featherstone, Saleem Haddad, Mark Haddon, Gaia Holmes, Matthew Holness, Meave Haughey, Adam Marek, Lucie McKnight Hardy, Mike Nelson, Christine Poulson, Sarah Schofield, Paul Theroux, Lara Williams and Gerard Woodward. Part of Comma's Modern Horror series. Purchase a copy direct from Comma Press by clicking here further readingCHRISTINE POULSON & LARA WILLIAMS AND THE NEW ABJECT EDITED BY SARAH EYRE & RA PAGESARAH SCHOFIELD AND THE NEW ABJECT EDITED BY SARAH EYRE & RA PAGESALEEM HADDAD AND THE NEW ABJECT EDITED BY SARAH EYRE & RA PAGERAMSEY CAMPBELL AND THE NEW ABJECT EDITED BY SARAH EYRE & RA PAGE    Comments are closed.
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