THE NEW ABJECT: TALES OF MODERN UNEASE EDITED BY SARAH EYRE AND RA PAGE

There is a rhythm in The New Abject that ties the whole book together even though the stories are so different from each other. They all explore and evoke something in us. Abjection told through and experienced in many ways, some alien to us and some close, but they all have one thing in common: they invite us to face it, not to reject it or to neutralise it, but to face it regardless of what it might elicit in ourselves. Maybe then, we can surmount it.

Having studied Kristeva’s theory of the abject I jumped at the opportunity to review this book – a collection of stories all exploring the multiple theories around abjection? Yes, please!

And I was not disappointed.

Through psychoanalysis Julia Kristeva theorised abjection – she argued that the border between self and its environment isn’t always clear and it is easily disrupted by encounters with those things which once belonged to us and have long been discarded. In other words, everything that is considered disgusting must be expelled in us for us to be clean – vomit, piss, sweat, shed skin, etc. However, one of the main criticisms of psychoanalysis is the fact that it is ahistorical, focused too much on the personal psychological development of a person, with everything being traced back to the infant and its relationship to the mother. This clearly limits the impact of cultural, historical and socio-economic influences on a person. And within this gap Georges Bataille created the idea of social abjection, bringing it to the realm of society and what it expels – what doesn’t belong within the confines of our society.

Exploring the abjection across both the psychological and the social realms is what The New Abject aims to do. The collection edited by Sarah Eyre and Ra Page frightens us through different points of view – we experience Kristeva’s abjection in the first six stories. Bernardine Bishop, Christine Poulson, Gaia Holmes, Lara Williams, Meave Haughey and Margaret Drabble all disgust us and make us face excrements, bodily fluids, hair, teeth, nail clippings and skin in their brilliant stories. Then, we, the readers, are taken on a journey, first going through a blurred boundary where the abjection becomes an insertion in Saleem Haddad’s story. We, then, experience abjection through the point of view of the abjected, the expelled, where one’s rejection is brought to the fore in the stories written by Matthew Holness, Sarah Schofield, Adam Marek and Karen Featherstone. In what follows in the book is a plethora of tales as imagined by some beautifully twisted minds, invasion (Gerard Woodward), mail-order sex brides (Paul Theroux), our own past invading our present (Mark Haddon and Ramsey Campbell), and abjection of whole classes, refugees and underclasses (David Constantine and Lucie McKnight Hardy). But the tales that frightened me the most were those that made me face myself: both Mike Nelson and Alan Beard delve into an exploration of what happens when we expel so much of ourselves and of what surround us that our own identity cannot be mediated through others and we find nothing more than walls to relate to.
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There is a rhythm in The New Abject that ties the whole book together even though the stories are so different from each other. They all explore and evoke something in us. Abjection told through and experienced in many ways, some alien to us and some close, but they all have one thing in common: they invite us to face it, not to reject it or to neutralise it, but to face it regardless of what it might elicit in ourselves. Maybe then, we can surmount it.

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.
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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 ​

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FURTHER READING 
​
Interviews 
CHRISTINE POULSON & LARA WILLIAMS AND THE NEW ABJECT EDITED BY SARAH EYRE & RA PAGE
​SARAH SCHOFIELD AND THE NEW ABJECT EDITED BY SARAH EYRE & RA PAGE
​SALEEM HADDAD AND THE NEW ABJECT EDITED BY SARAH EYRE & RA PAGE​
RAMSEY CAMPBELL AND THE NEW ABJECT EDITED BY SARAH EYRE & RA PAGE

Review by Daisy Lyle 
BOOK REVIEW: THE NEW ABJECT: TALES OF MODERN UNEASE EDITED BY SARAH EYRE AND RA PAGE