[Book Review] Eyes Guts Throat Bones (2023)

Moïra Fowley’s debut adult work is a shapeshifting and arresting short story collection which looks at the queer female body through experiences both horrific and sensual.

A lot of these stories are concerned with endings, particularly the end of the world or apocalyptic scenarios but also ends of relationships and ends of lives, so many stories are tinged with melancholy. However, all but one of these stories centres upon queer love and sapphic desire and identity, so despite the pervasive sense of melancholy these tales often still feel like celebrations, like triumphs. Fowley flips the script on what we are used to seeing in apocalyptic fiction and media: a man and woman navigating their relationship at the end of the world. Instead, we see how queer love is everywhere, pervading even through the most dire of circumstances and surviving the most devastating horrors.

LISTEN TO OUR HORROR PODCAST!

As the title of the collection suggests, these stories are all rooted in the body and its desires, perversions, and horrors. A good number of the stories showcase body horror to varying degrees, such as the opening tale ‘What Would You Give For A Treat Like Me’ in which a group of survivors traverse an apocalyptic landscape and find their bodies transformed into something new one by one. Another prominent body horror is ‘The Carrier’ which follows a monstrous pregnancy in all its tender and horrific moments. Even within stories that are not strictly within the body horror genre, the body still features prominently as the locus of horror as physical processes like hungers, desires, and desperation for survival, all have far-reaching consequences. This sense of the body as the site of both the horrific and the sublime is apt for Fowley’s exploration of queerness and queer bodies, as their presentation and desires have been and still are a space where violence and horror are experienced, both from within and from without. 

Alongside body horror and apocalypse, the other key genre of the collection is the ‘monster’ or ‘creature’ story, in fact for me these are some of the most memorable stories. ‘Such A Pretty Face’ follows a shapeshifting creature which must take a new shape every few months as its body and face, taken from an unsuspecting victim, wears out. We follow Louie as they navigate friendships and relationships alongside an urge to kill and take a new shape, particularly their relationship with the enamouring Mina. This is among the goriest stories in the collection however it follows the trend of ‘humanising’ the central monster and following them through their mundane activities and interactions, something we’ve also seen recently in Clare Kohda’s modern vampire story Woman, Eating (2022).

‘The Summoning’ is another of Fowley’s monster stories which details the accidental summoning of a demon on a university campus and an outcast protagonist who uses this to their gruesome advantage. The setting of the university, with all its incumbent characters and personality tropes, was very well rendered here, as well as Fowley’s formal and stylistic choices creating a memorable reading experience. However, the choice to write in an affectation of gen-z speech, with all the inserted ‘like’s and ‘kind of’s’ which litter our speech, is potentially divisive. It does cement readers in the headspace of the timid and unsure protagonist but these speech patterns, which feel natural when said aloud, did get slightly irritating to read on the page. But perhaps that was the point.

The horror waxes and wanes throughout this collection, with some stories only teetering on the edge of the horrific while others dive headfirst into it. If I had to classify the genre of the collection into a horror sub-category I’d say ‘whimsical horror’ – a lot of these stories are horrific, grotesque or heart-wrenching, but they have a playfulness to them, influences from fairy tales or local legend that makes them fun as well as disturbing. Granted, this could be disappointing to readers eager for outright and consistent horror, especially as some stories like ‘Rath’ only brush up against the horror genre with subtle references to historical and supernatural events in favour of following a relationship throughout the years. The collection is an interesting mix of tones and genres that definitely helps to amplify the horror or warmth of the stories that surround them.

Fowley also plays with form and style throughout the collection, with some stories appearing like plays (the one straight interlude in the collection hilariously titled ‘Sad Straight Sex At The End Of The World’), others with repetitive structures, others more abstract and reading almost like prose poetry where the narrative and horror are mingled with a potent lyricism that obscures and intrigues. This could be frustrating for readers that want a more straightforward horror story experience, however nothing about this collection is straight, why should the prose be either?

A surprising aspect of the collection was that despite the fantastical, apocalyptic, and horrific settings of the stories, many are still rooted in Irish setting and identity. Whether it’s the Irish university of ‘The Summoning’, the landmarks and nature of ‘Rath’ and ‘Break-up Poem Recited Knee-Deep in Bog Water’ or being haunted by the ghost of Boyzone’s Stephen Gately in ‘A Different Beat’, Ireland features prominently throughout and was a delightful surprise to read stories so otherworldly and so grounded in a real, tangible place.

Overall, this is an intriguing collection which manages to be both menacing and tender in almost equal measure.

RELATED ARTICLES

---

---