New York, NY: FSG Originals, 2019. 144 pages. $15.00.
The horror genre frequently dismantles and redefines the structures which have terrified audiences for generations. Horror evolves in trends—paranormal shifts to slasher, torture to found footage, monsters to home invasions. We can perhaps attribute its elusiveness to the its most foundational question: What makes someone fearful? In recent years, the critical and commercial success of movies and television shows such as Get Out, Hereditary, and The Haunting of Hill House suggest a new shift in the genre which forefronts the psychology and relationships of its characters as much as its hauntings. In the contemporary literary and post-2016 world, in which horrors are plentiful and genres that forefront violence have become exhausted and reductive, it is increasingly important that writers scare not only to shock, but to hold a mirror to the everyday grotesque in order to produce new insight. In her short story collection Rag, Maryse Meijer strips away the masked murderers and demons to return horror to its foundation—two characters intertwined by their desires, written to its surreal and, at times, deadly conclusion.
In many ways, Rag functions as a thematic continuation of Meijer’s 2018 novella Northwood, which uses the trope of the “cabin in the woods” to explore the liminal spaces of desire, fear, and violence. Meijer’s short stories operate under an atmosphere of threat, her close-to-the-bone writing style crafting a sparsity from which its most unsettling aspects emerge. Like the quiet, dread-filled tracking shot which proceeds a film’s jump scare, readers are willed to lean forward into fragmentary passages in order to parse every image. Precise in her language, Meijer lingers on depictions of the body, oftentimes at its most uncomfortable, yet the rest of the world remains shrouded. The collection’s opening story, “Her Blood,” begins on a description fit for horror:
She was standing at the side of the counter, in the hallway that led to the booths and the bathroom. Blood pasting her white jeans to her thighs. She was hunched almost double, arms wrapped around her stomach, limping hair lashing her face. She smiled around a crop of buck teeth. A strand of saliva looped to the floor. Sorry, she said, wiping her mouth to her wrist. I’m sorry.
In “Her Blood,” Meijer tells the story of a cashier and a woman who miscarries in the restaurant’s bathroom. After the narrator calls for an ambulance to assist her, their lives become interconnected, tied together by the secret they withhold from her boyfriend. Like many of her stories, Meijer traps her characters within a confined space, stealing the air other authors may grant to manage and ease tension. Like the cabin in the woods or decrepit mansion on the hill, this claustrophobic world forces readers to watch as the boyfriend “pulls her across the table for a kiss, her body jerking like a puppet” and the narrator cleans the toilet as “the thing squeezed down the pipe, and little bits of whatever it was gurgled back up into the pit of the bowl so that I had to stand there and flush until the water was clear.” There is nowhere to turn and no place to look away, only depictions of violence in its most naked form.
Despite this unflinching portrayal, Rag truly emerges as horror in its stories’ conclusions. Like comedies and tragedies, which are defined by the tone of the hero’s resolution, Meijer prods at the boundaries between horror and romance, two genres commonly viewed as fundamental opposites. By centering the readers’ attention on the push and pull of these flawed relationships, she is able to offer moments of potential optimism in the lives of her characters. In “The Shut-In,” a lonely college student attempts to make contact with a hermit-like neighbor by passing notes under the front door. The narrator becomes entranced by the shut-in, offloading fears and loneliness by attempting to connect with a character who refuses to respond. Meijer carefully balances elements of tenderness and danger, creating a tone that tempts readers to imagine the potential for connection while anticipating the ever-ominous possibility of calamity. Though the shut-in taps in affirmation when the narrator asks to visit with it again, its ultimate humanness is left in question, as it hides its face behind “a pig mask, red-cheeked and grinning, snout pressed against the milky glass.” The story draws its characters closer while luring the implication of some of the genre’s predominant tropes such as the veiled antagonist. It isn’t until the final lines when the narrator attempts to remove the shut-in’s mask that these sincere emotions and desires fade and the story reveals itself not as one of redemption, but horror:
I gripped the sides of its mask and pulled, hard, snapping the elastic that held the mask in place, the shut-in’s head wrenched forward, enormous, exposed, and the sound it made was terrible, not a human sound at all, much more like an animal, which is what it turned out I was—the shut-in had trusted me, and I had trusted myself, but never again.
Ultimately, the most gruesome acts in the collection are those that derive from attempted connection. Meijer’s characters are flawed and withdrawn into themselves, at times even despicable. But her most successful stories share similar emotional logic: that love is a product of action, which guides what may appear to be intensely vile or shocking actions. Meijer carefully distorts the worldviews of her characters, which turn acts of healing into harm. For example, in “Francis,” a man struggles to care for his deaf brother while working as a euthanizer of animals. After attempting to save a dying dog by allowing it to go free, only to find it dead on the side of the road later, the man returns home with his bag of needles to do the unthinkable. As he leans over his sleeping brother, he notes, “now I can be good to him. I know how.” Throughout her collection, Meijer continues to return to these instances of toxic love, in which tenderness slips into violence.
Rag proves itself to be a delicate balancing act between classic and reenvisioned horror. The collection maintains a precise attention to pace while removing the tropes that would prematurely tag itself as horror. While it is at times gruesome and shocking, it forgoes gratuitous gore. Meijer tilts the axis of her world ever so slightly, turning the familiar into the unsettling, characters into monsters, and genuine expressions of love into pain. The collection’s most unnerving moments, then, are those that most closely parallel the human while severing its humanness, creating a dark portrait of the recognizable and destructive desire for empathy. While this surreal shift becomes clear with time, the readers who first pick up Rag may find themselves in true shock of the horror that emerges from its beautiful prose and haunting characters.