by Spencer Hamilton
An F/F quarantine horror story
This is a horror story about a sapphic couple in crisis, Ashley and Jack, and the societal pressures that led them there. The one thing I didn’t see picked up on a lot of reviews is that Ash is a second generation Chinese American, which definitely coloured my view of her and my lens through the story. It’s the first time I’ve seen an Asian/white interracial relationship being a plot point in a horror novel. I related to parts of it a looooot.
As a subtitle of this book says, it’s a pandemic story. I read it in October 2021, when most of the south-eastern part of Australia, where I live, is in lockdown. Personally, I haven’t really left my house for months. That certainly added to my experience of this book.
It opens with a heavy dose of racism and homophobia, both of which I personally found were handled sensitively. The first half of book is extremely realistic, and for that reason actually worked better for me from a horror point of view—because those things do happen, can happen, are happening, which makes it far more terrifying than the rather fantastical descent into the surreal that the second half of the book takes.
It’s a relatively short and fast read. I actually found myself reluctant to turn the page occasionally, nauseated what by what might come next. It highlights the difficulties of being trapped in isolation in a marriage, where one of the parties experiences the symptoms mentioned in the content warnings below.
There’s some body horror, but not actually as much as I was fearing. I found both characters frustrating, but Jack especially so—I just wanted her to be able to get medication and mental health treatment, which I realise is extremely difficult to access at the best of times, even in high GDP countries, and impossible within the boundaries of the story logic.
I’ve seen some reviews that criticise the perceived fetishization of lesbian trauma. For what it’s worth, I didn’t feel this book did that. Yes, it’s about sapphic women undergoing trauma. Jack is bisexual; I can’t remember if we get a label for Ash. But while it’s never explicitly expressed, I feel part of the reason why they’re so dysfunctional and yet still together is that insistence upon lesbian relationships having to look happy; to look functional; to meet some kind of ideal that is impossible to achieve in real life, just to prove that we deserve marriage rights; that we deserve human rights. And that’s not great either. Idk. Of course you’re free to disagree. But I found this depiction of mental illness, relationship trauma, and grief to be oddly comforting. Both the sapphic relationship and mental illness in this story worked better for me than Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke.
Back to Ash’s ethnicity—it’s part of what makes her cling to Jack/co-dependent with Jack in the beginning. It’s them against the world, against their mostly estranged family, against the racism and homophobia of the outside, not to mention the virus. This would’ve been a slightly different story if the characters hadn’t been an interracial relationship.
That said, Ash’s decisions in the second half are a bit harder to relate to. Some of this is explained away by her not being in the best physical or mental shape herself, but still, I felt that Hamilton asks us to suspend our disbelief over perhaps one too many things. It was still compelling, still lyrical and the writing is absolutely beautiful at times–but the madness of the second half felt a little out of step with the more or less normality of the first half.
Warnings
Summary
This story was intensely compelling and I’m glad I read it. If you don’t mind reading a pandemic horror right now, you should give it a try.
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