Freakslaw by Jane Flett review – ‘this is a horror novel without any fear’
Words carry their own specific clandestine and occult powers: I am not talking about sorcery or witchcraft, but etymology. It is ironic that this novel by Jane Flett is thrice puffed as being “carnivalesqe”. Although its setting is a travelling circus, the preponderance of body horror and lubricious desires seems to occlude that carnival comes from “carne vale”; a leave-taking or goodbye to the fleshly. The original carnival was Shrove Tuesday, the final chance for indulgence before the penances of Lent. But these older meanings are lost beneath the fluorescent, day-glo frippery of it all.
The plot, such as it is, is mundane. The “freakslaw” turns up in a dour and repressed Scottish town, Pitlaw, and exacts its revenge on the denizens. The teenage witch and contortionist Nancy is the driving force, and the variously pierced, conjoined, obese, trans and hypertrichosic “liberate” Ruth and Derek from conformity into transgressive queerness. A puffing comparison to Angela Carter’s Nights At The Circus is obligatory and misleading, invoking Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love is smarter but still a country mile wide of the mark. More precise would be the equally saccharine The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, but with more of the polymorphous perverse. The revenge is, naturally, for the witches that were killed there in the 17th century, and the carnies want, pun intended, what’s fair. (Fair, etymologically, comes from the Latin feriae, religious festival, linked to festus, meaning solemn).
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Hide AdThis is just one of the problems with this novel. The “justice” is the lex talionis – an eye for an eye; in effect, perpetual vendetta rather than restitution. For all its flaunted iconoclasm, it is a profoundly Manichean work. It does not make dichotomies problematic or arbitrary, it merely inverts them: freaks good, norms bad. I remember this being done with more subtlety and wit in 2000 AD’s Strontium Dogs when I was a child. This ersatz daring extends to books themselves – Ruth finds Sartre’s Nausea “terrifically dull. Roquentin’s always mooning around, getting ever so upset over an old stone, a soggy bit of paper on the street”. I think existentialism is a tad more important than cosplay radicalism, and one can almost admire the audacity of naming a section “Being & Nothingness”. The prose is, well... it is best if I the reader two examples to judge: “Crisped potatoes and fluffy orange clouds of mashed carrot and a mayonnaise so thick and creamy it attains to the exact texture of God”; “When they kiss, its’ like she’s dipped her clit in battery acid”. The second I personally think is exceptionally ill-judged.
Nancy is the novel’s most typical character, an entitled, amoral anarchist. She has “had enough of listening to the old guard – and that includes any long-dead ancestors who think this is the time to start rattling their gums. If you ask her, what’s really called for is a proper sacrifice. Slaughter. A red mist raining down like early-morning dew”. In the novel’s moral universe, we are asked to admire this adolescent goth Khmer Rouge. The slapdash thinking is made most explicit in a throwaway line, that Ruth has been accepted to study Accountancy at St Andrews. St Andrews does not offer such a course.
The cardinal sin is that this is a horror novel without any fear. It has overdosed on the suspension of disbelief. Everything is so caricatured, nothing appears as threatening. It is worthwhile comparing it to the exquisitely eerie and unfairly cancelled TV series Carnivale, or better yet, Tod Browning’s 1932 film Freaks (which Flett must know as she quotes the refrain “One of Us”). Freaks is infinitely more frightening, more experimental and daring as a text and actually has a genuinely affecting and moving ethical core.
By chance I have actually been reading other horror novels at the same time. Woodworm by Layla Martínez is a shuddersome, slim novel narrated in turn by a granddaughter and grandmother. From the opening sentence, “I walked in and the house pounced on me”, it has the building itself as a character, a prison and a trap at the same time. Given the background of the Spanish Civil War and the continuing rural poverty, the stakes regarding what has happened and is still happening couldn’t be higher. Martínez uses a festering misogyny to knot together generations of suppressed history.
Mateo García Elizondo’s Last Date In El Zapotal, meanwhile, is narrated by a drug addict, who has chosen the town as the ideal place to inject his carefully calibrated suicidal last dose. Life proves both tenacious and permeable, as ghosts from his past seem to linger, and Elizondo pulls off a staggering, left-field literary trick in the final third of the novel, which is not a gimmick and which rewrites everything beforehand. Elizondo is the grandson of Gabriel García Marquez, and absolutely does not need to appeal to literary genetics to establish himself as a serious and properly haunting novelist. Given the Mexican setting, Bolaño and Lowry are his genuine ancestors.
Both novels have something that Flett lacks: that blasphemies are only troubling when there is still a vestige of faith.
Freakslaw, by Jane Flett, Doubleday, £16.99