[Book Review] Nineteen Claws And A Black Bird (2020)

Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender Is The Flesh was a grisly, dystopian tale of industrial cannibalism which took over BookTok with its genuinely shocking look at morality and meat. Her second work to be translated into English, short story collection Nineteen Claws And A Black Bird (first published in 2020) is perhaps not as outrageous, but still packs in plenty of sublime and disturbing stories across the collection.

This is a tightly crafted collection, with many stories not reaching beyond ten pages but still mostly delivering on the blurb’s promise to delve into “the dark heart of our desires, fears and fantasies”. As with most short story collections there was some unevenness, with the brevity Bazterrica’s style leaving some stories feeling incomplete or gesturing towards a climax that never fully arrived. However, these instances were few and far between in the collection, especially impressive in a collection with twenty stories over its two-hundred pages.

It’s also a profoundly intertextual collection, with many of the stories having their own epigraphs from other writers or referencing other works and media within them. Alongside this, the stories feel embedded in urban space – cities, suburbs, taxis, and psychiatrists’ offices. These two qualities mean the horror within feels strikingly close to home, adding a familiarity necessary for Bazterrica’s uncanny project.

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A collection’s opening story says so much about what is to come and the absurd ‘A Light, Swift And Monstrous Sound’ reflects the mixing of horror and surrealism which runs throughout Nineteen Claws. The story follows a woman confronted with a dentist, her upstairs neighbour, falling to his death at her feet. It’s a remarkable opening which manages to be wildly entertaining and confronts what it takes to shock us out of mundanity and pay attention to those around us.

‘Unamuno’s Boxes’ follows a woman taking a taxi and becoming increasingly concerned and frantic imagining whether the driver is or is not a serial killer, collecting ‘evidence’ from the surroundings of the car and his appearance. This story read as somewhat of an indictment of true crime culture and the suspicion it can create in amateur ‘experts’ it creates.

As previously mentioned, many of the stories in the collection are extremely short but no less impactful for their concision. Particular highlights are ‘Roberta’, a disturbing look at child grooming which illustrates Bazterrica’s talent for looking head-on at the ugly and horrific inherent in real life, without the need to invoke monsters or gore. ‘Architecture’ also clocks in at only four-and-a-half pages and could be seen as more of a description than a full story. However, it details a dark and hellish vision of a church, turning sacred architecture into a profane space where crucifixes transform into great black dragonflies. ‘The Continuous Equality of the Circumference’ is Bazterrica’s disturbing absurd take on a feminist treatise against beauty standards and diet culture as a woman seeks to turn herself into a perfect sphere through consumption. It’s a short but perfect look at how any beauty standard, however subversive it may appear, can be destructive to the mind and body.

In my opinion, the collection peaks towards the end. ‘Mary Carminium’ is an interesting take on both the femme fatale story, which follows a pair of vulgar men who take delight in numerically scoring the women they pursue. They get their due as they stumble into what seems to be a strange, dreamlike underground concert where all the men present are unsettlingly silent. Its use of horror tropes like the cult or the revenge tale to explore misogyny and its punishment makes for an intriguing and quietly shocking story with an ambiguous ending.

The final story in the collection cements Nineteen Claws as urban horror, taking place in a subway train and the tunnels they occupy beneath the city. ‘The Solitary Ones’ is full of a creeping dread that builds to a distinctly unsettling end, with the dark and claustrophobic setting of subway tunnels and familiar fear of being a woman travelling home at night making this extremely effective – everything feels like it is closing in on the central character as the story creeps from realism into horror the further she creeps along the tracks.

That final story brings together some of the collection’s main concerns about how urban space and gender interact to produce horror, and also how there are bigger, less comprehensible horrors beyond these more familiar sites of fear. It’s a brilliant collection and an interesting follow-up to the lauded Tender Is The Flesh. Even if you’re not sure about short stories, give this a go – you’re sure to leave shaken.

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