The New Scream Queens
In 2011, Maira Maidana’s boyfriend told her he was going to leave her. Unlike previous times they’d had this argument, she told him he should go. That night he doused her in alcohol and lit her on fire while she was praying. In a story for the AP, Luis Andres Hanoa and Debora Rey wrote that while Maidana was burning, she tried the shower, the bathroom sink, and the kitchen faucet. No water came out anywhere. “He had either closed the taps or let the water run dry. He followed her with a blanket in one hand and a bottle of alcohol in the other.”
In Argentina, according to the women’s rights group La Casa del Encuentro, there were 2,384 femicides between 2008 and 2016. That’s nearly 300 a year, and that number doesn’t include Maira Maidana, who survived—who underwent dozens of surgeries and skin grafts, lost most of her hair, half of her weight, hearing in her right ear, and sight in her left eye. Fearing retribution from her boyfriend, she initially told family and police that she had poured alcohol on herself, that she had set herself on fire.
The title story from Mariana Enriquez’s 2017 horror collection Things We Lost in the Fire engages with this national trauma. It begins with “the subway girl.” “[Her husband] thought she was cheating on him and he was right—she’d been about to leave him. To keep that from happening, he ruined her. Decided she would belong to no one else.” Similar to Maidana’s boyfriend, the man disfigures his wife with alcohol and fire. “While she couldn’t talk, when she was in the hospital and everyone was expecting her to die, [her husband] claimed she’d burned herself, that she’d spilled alcohol during a fight and then tried to smoke a cigarette, still wet.” In the story, it’s conjectured that it was maybe with “the subway girl” that the Burning Women movement—a haunting society in which women help other women burn themselves—got its start. But many others in the story have trouble believing that so many women would do this on purpose—would choose self-immolation as protest or escape.
National misogyny is one of many preoccupations of Enriquez’s work. As Enriquez’s translator Megan McDowell writes, “A shadow hangs over Argentina and its literature,” noting that the stories in this collection take place in a country distorted by stretches of state terrorism, economic instability, and precarious infrastructure. She writes that Argentina is a nation “that even in this decade has seen egregious instances of femicides and violence against women.” McDowell also notes that most of Enriquez’s characters are women, and that her stories often offer a sense of the contingency and danger of occupying a female body.
A country haunted by dictatorships, political violence, and the ghostly absence of thousands of people who were “disappeared”—it’s fitting that Enriquez’s tales of women in Argentina should take the form of horror stories. A New Yorker interviewer once asked Enriquez if the political subtext and the supernatural come together easily in her stories. “To me they do. The sheer terror of the institutional violence and the dictatorships in South America has always verged on something that is beyond just a government’s mechanical repression—there was and is, when it surfaces, something more essentially evil about it.”
Horror stories often push some real-world dysfunction to its logical end, and as such they offer rich opportunities for allegory. They also frequently engage with the experience of tyranny. Consider the 2017 movie Get Out, a stunner about the simultaneity of violent racism and the fetishization of blackness in America. Consider It Follows, in which sexual behavior murderously trails those who engage in it. Or continue all the way back to 1892, when Charlotte Perkins Gilman published “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a tale of a woman’s descent into madness and the violently ignorant and patronizing attitude toward women’s health in the late 19th century.
Feminist short horror, then, is not a new tradition—it predates the mid-20th century writers like Shirley Jackson and Angela Carter who remain icons of the genre, and writers like Margaret Atwood and Ursula Le Guin who have championed it further. Most years we can count on at least one horror collection from a writer like Kelly Link, Helen Oyeyemi, Karen Russell, or Julia Elliot. But this year is something special: there are four new short story collections at the intersection of feminism and horror. In addition to Mariana Enriquez come haunting collections by Lesley Nneka Arimah, Carmen Maria Machado, and Camilla Grudova. While these books have horror in common, they also happen to be some of the most resonant collections of 2017. Each book offers its own particular brutalities, but the prevailing experience of female oppression recurs as we leave Argentina.
Poet Elisabeth Hewer’s line “god should have made girls lethal / when he made monsters of men,” is the opening epigraph to Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties, a 2017 National Book Award finalist. In “The Husband Stitch,” Machado rewrites the classic campfire story “The Green Ribbon,” making it sexier, scarier, and longer-form. “What’s that?” a boy asks the central girl early in the story. “Oh this?” the narrator says. touching the ribbon at the back of her neck. “It’s just my ribbon.” She tells him he shouldn’t touch it. He can’t touch it. But touch it is all he wants to do. Over the years, the man accuses the woman of keeping secrets. Both he and their eventual son grow to distrust her, conjuring the spirit in which a woman’s testimony is ruthlessly disbelieved or investigated—think of any woman who’s ever come forward with a charge of sexual assault. “Do you want to untie the ribbon?” she finally asks him. “After these many years, is that what you want of me?” “Yes,” he says. “Yes.” And if you remember what happens in the original story, you know what happens next.
Horror stories which center around women also often engage with maternity. Think Rosemary’s Baby, The Babadook, and Stranger Things. Or consider Lesley Nneka Arimah’s What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, a collection of stories that take place in both the U.S. and Nigeria. In “Who Will Greet You at Home,” women literally construct their babies out of worldly materials. Arimah writes, “[Ogechi’s] mother had formed her from mud and twigs and wrapped her limbs tightly with leaves, like moin-moin: pedestrian items that had produced a pedestrian girl.”
Metaphors for generational poverty abound in Arimah’s story; it doesn’t take much work to relate this story to income inequality in Nigeria, The United States, or most places in the world. “Who Will Greet You at Home” wrestles with the pain of wanting something better for your child when there is no model for it. It’s not just the absence of jobs and opportunities, or the under-resourced communities, or the omnipresence of crime and drugs, hunger and poor education—it’s all of it, all at once for most mothers and children living in poverty.
Arimah’s protagonist Ogechi loses her baby in a devastating final scene. The occasion is loud and violent, and nobody comes to help her. But she takes the ashes of her child and starts again. “This she knew. How to make firm clay—something she was born to do. When the mix was just right, she added a handful of the ashes. Let this child be born in sorrow, she told herself. Let this child live in sorrow. Let this child not grow into a foolish, hopeful girl.”
Camilla Grudova, author of The Doll’s Alphabet, approaches maternity with a coarser touch, if a no less haunting one. In the story “Waxy,” her narrator tells us, “To find a Man who had enough Exam prize money and also wanted to have children. That was the Goal of Life.”
The narrator’s hands are ruined from the chemicals she uses at work, but it’s her responsibility to make it possible for her Man to study philosophy books so he can win Exam money. She’s not sure she really wants to have children with her terrible Man, but “it would take several months of saving [her] salary without buying anything to be able to afford contraceptives. It was near impossible without Exam money.” She also adds that some men don’t like to spend their money on contraceptives; they prefer to buy alcohol, tobacco, and bowties.
Here, there are echoes of our U.S. Senate, which, in addition to being 79% male, was recently prepared to pass a health care reform bill that, among other things, would have blocked access to preventative care for women and ended nationwide protection for maternity coverage. And the Trump administration recently moved to roll back the contraceptive coverage mandate, which under the Affordable Care Act had removed cost as a barrier to birth control.
Grudova’s narrator eventually gives birth to a monstrous baby: “It was a tiny, waxy child, like a little cheese rind, that barely ever cried. I think it knew by some survival instinct it wasn’t supposed to.” The narrator knows there’s not even a chance of registering the child with the powers that be because her Man has no identification papers and thus no traction in this nightmarishly bleak world. “I didn’t mind,” the narrator says, “because one of the first things a girl learns in school is that every Man has his own special problems, and it’s one’s duty to take care of them.” But her roommate is horrified by this illegal situation, and the narrator and her Man kill her to keep her quiet. While escaping through the cold city, they wear socks on their hands since neither own mittens. Eventually, The Man idiotically proposes that they can live inside a cracker tin he has brought with them. “I was too tired to contradict him anymore,” the narrator says.
This is another recurring theme throughout these books: the differences in both quality of life and cost of living for men and women. In another Enriquez story, “Spiderweb,” the narrator’s husband Juan Martín complicates a trip to Paraguay with her cousin in ways that make her want to leave or kill him. In the story’s most frightening scene, the three travelers stop for lunch and watch Paraguayan soldiers sexually harass their waitress. “Juan Martin got up and I could just imagine what was going go happen next. He was going to yell at them to leave her alone; he was going to play the hero, and then they would arrest all three of us. They would rape Natalia and me in the dictator’s dungeons, day and night, and they would torture me with electric shocks on my pubic hair,” Enriquez writes. “He would have it easy because they killed men with a bullet through the back of the skull, and done.”
In Arimah’s story “Buchi’s Girls,” a guy named Dickson is described as the “sort of man people pretended to like because they couldn’t afford not to. His presence in a room disrupts the easy feel.” Arimah writes, “The consequences of disrespecting a man like Dickson are always disproportionate to the sin.”
But horror is also a genre for catharsis, and the women in these stories are only sometimes victims. They are just as often arbiters of fear themselves. In Grudova’s story “The Mouse Queen,” a mother turns into a wolf after giving birth to twins. She leaves at night and steals books and sausages from the shops in town. Her children distrust her, even though she steals them toys. “I had more breasts as a wolf,” she says, “but they refused to feed from me.” One fitful night, she accidentally eats them.
In Enriquez’s story “The Intoxicated Years,”—about national economic collapse and a group of hard-living friends in Buenos Aires—three girls accidentally wound one of their boyfriends and leave him bleeding and seizing on the lawn. “Someone put a new record on back in the house, which seemed so far away,” Enriquez writes. “We were waiting for Andrea to leave the boy on the ground and come back to us, so the three of us could be together once again, waving our blue fingernails, intoxicated, dancing before the mirror that reflected no one else.”
And there are even more examples of feminist literary horror in 2017 Samanta Schweblin’s Man Booker International-nominated Fever Dream; the reissue of Leonora Carrington’s surreal horror memoir, Down Below, or the release of The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington by Dorothy, a publishing project. This Fall will also see the New Directions reissue of Mrs. Caliban, a 1983 B-horror novel about a lonely housewife carrying out an affair with a lizard-like creature.
It is not a surprise that feminist horror continues to resonate in 2017, when the man who was recording saying, “Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything,” assumed our highest political office. But one thing feminist horror also grants us is the company of dissent. “Girls with fire in their bellies will be forced to drink from a well of correction till the flames die out,” Arimah writes in “Redemption.” “But my tongue stirred anyway.”
Originally published in Literary Hub.
