Oddbody by Rose Keating: Superbly crafted horror stories about having a body and being a woman
Author
:
Rose Keating
ISBN-13
:
978-1837261864
Publisher
:
Canongate
Guideline Price
:
£14.99
A clue – and more than a clue – to the nature of Rose Keating's aesthetic can be found in the title of the fourth story included in Oddbody, her debut collection: Bela Lugosi Isn't Dead. If you know your subcultural history, you will be aware that Bela Lugosi's Dead is the title of the 1979 Bauhaus song that originated Goth Rock.
The lyric '[F]lowers/bereft in deathly bloom' gives a fair sample of the foundational Goth vibe. A certain quality of deadpan camp; a theatrical morbidity; flowers, graveyards, bats at twilight, love lies bleeding; a sonic landscape of skeletal post-punk rattle and boom. The Goths – late descendants of the 19th-century decadent movement – are still with us: street romantics of lace, leather and eyeliner, here to remind us that life and death are, if they're anything, aesthetic phenomena.
Bela Lugosi
, in full
Dracula
drag, duly appears, undead, in Bela Lugosi Isn't Dead. Bela, or his cinematic ghost, is the intimate companion or pet of a 14-year-old girl, Saoirse. 'We're sick,' Bela tells Saoirse, in the story's opening lines, as they wake up in her bedroom. Mam bustles in: 'Up.' Bela disports himself, bursts, stinks, transforms into a bat. Mam doesn't bat an eyelid (sorry) until, halfway through the story, she finally says, 'I think this needs to stop […] I remember what this was like, at your age […] But Saoirse, I'm sorry. It's not healthy. He is
bad
for you.'
A stricken teenage girl haunted by the ghost of Bela Lugosi-as-Dracula; the whole thing treated, by every character, with imperturbable matter-of-factness, as if it's an accepted part of life, of growing up. The suggestion – via mention of the 'overexposed' photo of Dad that 'Mum keeps on the mantlepiece' – that Bela is the externalisation of unmanageable feelings: grief, adolescent malaise, adolescent morbidity. The story is deadpan, even as more death (in this case of Saoirse's cat, Ginger) obtrudes, even as Bela guides Saoirse towards fantasies of resurrection and repair. Or are they, in fact, realities?
READ MORE
Bela Lugosi Isn't Dead is a neat example of Keating's deadpan expressionism. The title story, Oddbody, works similarly. A second-person protagonist is followed around, haunted, hectored, entertained, by a ghost; in the world of this story, having a ghost is normal, if socially fraught, like being depressed, or – another possible metaphor here – being on your period. 'Did you bring your ghost to my flat?' asks the protagonist's unpleasant boyfriend, Ben. 'Do you have any idea how inappropriate that is?'
The ghost urges 'you' to consider suicide; viciously criticises 'your' body ('Look at the bulging waves of cellulite rippling across the inner thighs'); is, nonetheless, familiar, even beloved. The tightness of its embrace 'feels so very much like being held'.
It should by now be obvious that Keating isn't just a prose Goth. Her stories draw on another powerful tributary – specifically, feminist arguments about the fates of the female body under patriarchy. The ghost, in Oddbody, sounds like depression – and the story works beautifully as a dark and funny account of that state.
But equally, the ghost sounds like the messages that patriarchy whispers and shouts to women. 'It's not a bad ghost,' the protagonist insists to Ben, 'I'm fine, really.' At one point, 'the ghost has given in to diffusion'. It's everywhere – like depression; like a ruling ideology.
Expressionism – see Kafka – works by literalising emotional states or political ideas. The 10 stories in Oddbody are all expressionist in this sense. In the funniest story, Squirm, a young woman named Laura is taking care of her father; her father, formerly human, is now a large segmented worm who lives in a soil-filled bath. Nobody in the story thinks this is strange. 'Is there something wrong with him?' asks Liam, a man Laura meets on a fetish website. 'He's a worm,' Laura replies. Liam, driving them through the countryside, says, 'Look, sheep.'
In Kafka's Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa's family suffers social embarrassment at the fact that Gregor is now an insect; Keating riffs on this surrealist insight to tell startling, funny, alarming stories about what happens to our feelings when they collide with the social world, and about how that social world can mould our feelings, especially if we are women. #
[
Short stories from Kafka to the Kafkaesque: making strange again
Opens in new window
]
In Next to Cleanliness, a young woman undergoes a 'cleanse' supervised by a charismatic doctor; it strips her down to her skeleton. In Eggshells, women lay literal eggs; it is a social faux pas to lay one at work.
The stories in Oddbody are superbly crafted – though they might perhaps best be read one at a time (a certain sameness is detectable if you read them one after the other). The prose is confident, witty and perceptive. These are sharp and memorable horror stories about the most ordinary horrors: having a body; having a heart; being a woman in the 21st-century West.
Kevin Power is assistant professor of English at Trinity College Dublin
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Irish Times
5 hours ago
- Irish Times
Ozzy Osbourne's fond send-off was the least depressing thing on the news
'Ozzy, Ozzy, Ozzy,' the crowds chanted as Ozzy Osbourne 's funeral cortege paused at Black Sabbath Bridge, in his home city of Birmingham, and his widow and children laid their own flowers amid the amassed bouquets, fan-sketched portraits, customised football scarves and bat-shaped balloons. Amid the litany of abject grimness otherwise known as just another summer news bulletin, it was heavy-metal fans who provided the unity and warmth of spirit. Through tears, Sharon Osbourne, the singer's wife, flashed them a peace sign; their daughter Kelly waved to onlookers. The Black Sabbath frontman said he wanted his funeral to be a celebration, not a 'mope-fest', and though the ceremony itself was private, the procession lived up to his desired billing, with the hearse preceded by a local brass band playing Sabbath tunes and the gathered thousands chipping in both reverent vocals and swells of raucous appreciation. 'That was worse than the queen, that was,' one male fan reckoning with his emotions told the BBC. Television coverage of this public homage to the 'Prince of Darkness' did indeed have the touch of a royal event about it, with reporters vox-popping fans about what Ozzy meant to them and why they had come. READ MORE The difference was that John Michael Osbourne, possessing no birthright whatsoever, had actually moved culture along in his time, and this was a day laced with humour, relatability and grit. Love for Ozzy was not only wrapped in municipal pride but also inseparable from the reassuring sense of belonging that being a fan of certain bands or genres of music gives people – or used to, at least. Watching this salute, I was struck by the feeling that we are close to the start of what is likely to be an inverted U-shaped graph of music-superstar send-offs, ones where people are given the chance to pay mass tribute to shared idols. There's definitely more to come, a lot more. [ Interviewing Ozzy Osbourne: 'You can't live that way forever. It catches up with you eventually' Opens in new window ] I remember thinking during the televised funeral of Shane MacGowan – complete with the church rendition of Fairytale of New York by a supergroup of musical luminaries – in December 2023 that this was a gloriously new benchmark, one that the families of other artists would be inspired to replicate when the time comes. But once all the icons whose careers thrived in more culturally finite times are gone, then what? It's not that you need a monolithic music scene or analogue broadcasting industry for moments of cohesion like these. Heavy metal was always much marginalised by the media. But you do need a world that hasn't fallen victim to the dead hand of tech platforms that simultaneously flatten out music culture and fragment it to the point where its role in identity formation is now much less potent than before. 'Is Gen X dying before our eyes?' the Hollywood Reporter wondered last week. Before our eyes! I hope not. (Osbourne himself, born in 1948, predates it.) Still, despite the Black Mirror-ish image this headline conjured up, the article wasn't wrong when it cited the death of Kurt Cobain, in April 1994, as the defining event for a generation characterised in youth as disaffected and doom-filled. Shown on MTV News throughout that year as mourning snowballed, footage from the Seattle vigil for the Nirvana singer burned on my teenage brain. I'd never heard anything as raw in my life as Courtney Love's taped message to fans, in which she read out part of her husband's suicide note while simultaneously railing against its most dangerous assertions. Preserved on YouTube , the stunned silence of the crowd remains palpable, and – whether it was a wise thing to do or not – you can almost see Cobain's legacy embedding itself in the cultural soil in real time. When we're let into someone else's shock and pain like this, it alters our relationship with celebrity. Expectations change. MTV, by then already pioneering the reality genre with The Real World, played its part in shifting fan culture away from one of distant, unknowable icons into something messier, more open, more confessional. Ozzy Osbourne funeral: a street artist adds to a Black Sabbath mural in Birmingham. Photograph: Joanna Yee/New York Times It was later the home of The Osbournes, of course, which is the unrepeatable facet of Ozzy's story: here was a musician who built his base in a finite, terrestrial landscape, achieved a new style of fame via a cable-TV megahit and died in the era of social media and live streaming. For devotees beyond Birmingham, there was a link to follow the procession as it passed Black Sabbath Bridge. This yielded hunger for more access, with some YouTube commenters disappointed that it turned out to be a fixed street camera with no sound – they were advised to consult fan-made videos instead. Even without comparable hometown-hero status, waves of household-name artists whose careers straddled similar eras are on track to receive huge, internet-fuelled public goodbyes, in which pure admiration mingles with personal nostalgia and sentiment. But will any of them be as uplifting and uncomplicated and fond as Ozzy Osbourne's? That seems more doubtful.
Irish Times
5 hours ago
- Irish Times
Bless Me Father by Kevin Rowland: Dexys star gives a powerful account of his life
Bless Me Father: A Life Story Author : Kevin Rowland ISBN-13 : 978-1529958720 Publisher : Ebury Spotlight Guideline Price : £25 The Colonel and the King Tom Parker, Elvis Presley and the Partnership that Rocked the World Author : Peter Guralnick ISBN-13 : 978-1399635295 Publisher : White Rabbit Guideline Price : £35 Kevin Rowland and Dexys Midnight Runners made three of the best albums of the 1980s. Now, it is time for him to tell some of the best stories. A press release announces this is Rowland's first book and 'he does not intend to write another'. A previous effort to capture Rowland's extraordinary life in print was documented by Ted Kessler in 2022's Paper Cuts: How I Destroyed the British Music Press and Other Misadventures, where the former Q editor memorably wrote: 'The chemistry isn't right between us? Is Kevin Rowland of Dexys Midnight Runners breaking up with me?' Kessler's project was abandoned as Rowland felt his story should be told in his own voice, which makes Bless Me Father: A Life Story a breathtakingly raw and unvarnished read. Rowland's vocals are a famously innovative take on a soulful croon where he sounds like he is crying. Sometimes, there is a slight sense of him gently sobbing when he writes. He seems incapable of acknowledging his talent and success, let alone daring to blow his own trumpet. READ MORE As its title suggests, Catholic guilt looms large. Rowland opts for a confessional tone that is remarkably candid, telling how a devoted altar boy, who often served multiple masses a day, transformed into a teenage truant who ran away from home and got into numerous brushes with the law. Rowland had a volatile and estranged relationship with his father, who regularly beat him up and treated him like the black sheep of the family. One of the most moving aspects of Bless Me Father is how their relationship became tender and loving before Rowland's dad died in 2021 at the grand age of 102. In addition to his trials and tribulations at home, Rowland became confused about his identity. He perfected a chameleon-like ability to change his accent when he returned to England from Crossmolina, Co Mayo, and yet again when his family relocated from Birmingham to London, where Rowland was forced to drop his Brummie burr and adopt clipped Cockney tones to avoid getting a hiding. This constant need to look over his shoulder, both at home and on the street, contributed to Rowland becoming adaptable but anxious. Clothes are a huge part of Kevin Rowland's story and identity. Photograph: Nicky Johnston Despite morphing his accent, Rowland continued to follow Wolverhampton Wanderers while living in London. He witnessed England's triumph over West Germany at the World Cup Final in Wembley in 1966 and enjoyed a highly memorable encounter with Muhammad Ali. Still cherishing the memory nearly 60 years later, he writes: 'My dad, a strict disciplinarian and a staunch Irish republican, dropping me off at Wembley Way, knowing I was planning to bunk into the World Cup final to support England. It was like a positive spell had taken over London.' Unlike so many hackneyed rock memoirs about acts plagued by division and infighting, Rowland doesn't seem at all interested in settling scores. Instead, he proffers profuse apologies for past behaviour. He says sorry for ejecting two girlfriends of other band members off a tour bus due to his strict adherence to a no-partners rule, begging for their forgiveness if they happen to be reading. His recollections of his years in the throes of cocaine addiction are harrowing. Ultimately, after a few false starts, he emerges as a survivor. Considering he once consumed a cocktail of a staggering amount of powdered ecstasy tablets mixed with lager, it is fortuitous that he has even lived to tell these tall tales. His experience of the early 90s was mad, rather than madferit. Clothes are a huge part of his story and identity. A former hairdresser, Rowland rues the decision to change their look for a high-profile tour with The Specials before achieving breakthrough success. 'I feel we missed an opportunity to become the most culturally significant and coolest group of the 1980s,' Rowland laments. 'I have found it very hard to forgive myself for that decision. In fact, I've tortured myself about it over the years.' The New Romantic look they dabbled with was ditched for dungarees, a look captured in the video of their career-defining hit, Come on Eileen, their second number one following Geno and also a chart-topper in the United States. Kevin Rowland has raised the game for autobiographies by musicians at a time when they are in danger of becoming a predictable late career exercise. Photograph: David Corio/ Redferns When Rowland signed a record deal he was already jaded and completely sick of the music industry. He garnered a fiercely committed fan base, many of whom have stuck with him to this day, yet he reveals his paranoia and scepticism extended to those who loved his group the most. 'I didn't even trust the fans who would come to wish us well after a gig,' he writes. 'I thought they might have agendas, having spoken to other band members about me.' Rowland has gone through the mill and produced a powerful account of his life, but I'm not so sure if he realises just how great an achievement it is. Music memoir publishing has blossomed in the wake of Keith Richards' Life in 2010, and Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run in 2016. As the 21st century splutters towards the end of its first quarter, Rowland has raised the game for autobiographies by musicians at a time when they are in danger of becoming a predictable late-career exercise. [ Passion, booze, madness and comradeship: Bruce Springsteen's special relationship with Ireland Opens in new window ] As Oasis dominate the headlines with their reunion tour trundling into Croke Park, this is a thrilling tale of how another second-generation Irishman with Mayo roots conquered a world of his own creation. Rowland didn't enjoy fame when he was in the thick of it in the early 1980s, and there was also a messy and prolonged financial fallout, so he deserves to savour his terrific career and this marvellous book about a life less ordinary. At both the beginning and the end of Bless Me Father, Rowland quotes lyrics from the Elvis song Follow That Dream, which Springsteen has also covered. Elvis Presley and his manager Colonel Tom Parker are surrounded by armed services police in Hawaii, 1961. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/ Getty Images Presley's veteran biographer, Peter Guralnick, whose books Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love are widely considered to be definitive accounts, now turns to Colonel Tom Parker, the mysterious Svengali figure said to have made Presley's success possible, in The Colonel and the King: Tom Parker, Elvis Presley and the Partnership that Rocked the World . He was neither a colonel nor a Parker, but a Dutch immigrant named Andreas van Kuijk, who entered the United States illegally when he was 20 years old, where he claimed he was American born, assumed a new identity and enlisted in the army. In an era when immigration is yet again such a contentious powder keg, an illegal immigrant playing such an instrumental role in creating the Elvis phenomenon, which was arguably America's defining cultural export of the 20th century, is richly ironic. Colonel Parker worked as a carny in a travelling circus and became inducted into the world of entertainment. He pioneered a gimmick called the Wedding on the Wheel, where he would visit a local courthouse and collect the names of every couple who had applied for a marriage licence. After choosing a couple at random, they were wed on a Ferris wheel and Parker procured them a dress, suit and a bridal suite from local businesses. As a result of such early marketing masterclasses, Parker ended up working with Gene Austin and rejuvenated the prototype crooner's career. Seeking new challenges, the colonel expanded into management. Sun Studio founder Sam Phillips discovered Elvis, but Colonel Parker made him a superstar, steering him towards RCA Records and subsequently breaking every record in existence. Presley sold a whopping 12 million records in 1956 alone and an Elvis song held the number one spot on either the pop, country or R&B charts for a staggering 80 weeks that year. His advice to Elvis at this thrilling, but terrifying juncture was three short words: 'Stay the course.' Elvis Presley with his manager Colonel Tom Parker backstage before the singer appeared on the Ed Sullivan show, in New York in October 1956. Photograph: CBSNearly a half a century before the advent of social media, Presley's reputation was badly smirched by a baseless rumour claiming he had said: 'The only thing Negroes can do for me is buy my records and shine my shoes.' Parker arranged for the star reporter of the black culture magazine, Jet, to come on to the set of Jailhouse Rock and interview Presley at length about his love of black artists and attending black churches in Memphis. The rumour subsided after the story was published. While undeniably a damage-limitation exercise, Parker's actions appeared to be deeply sincere – he never forgot how an African American family cared for him as a young immigrant at a time when no one else seemed to care less. Divided into two parts – Parker's story and a vast archive of letters – The Colonel and the King peels back the layers of myth, celebrity and the American dream, charting the giddy highs and sorrowful lows. Guralnick reveals Elvis was so stricken by grief following the sudden death of his mother that Parker looked after all the practicalities of the funeral and the acknowledgment of more than 100,000 condolence cards and letters from all over the world. 'While Elvis remained frozen in his grief, Colonel was just as clearly frozen in his inability to help the one person in the world he would have wanted to protect,' Guralnick writes. Unlike most artist and manager relationships, Presley and Parker was a true partnership where profits were 50/50. Such a deal looks exploitative in the context of today's entertainment world, where the standard rate of managerial commission tends to be 20 per cent, but Parker stopped taking on other clients to focus all his time and energy into Elvis. Guralnick calls their relationship 'a unique confluences of forces'. Often perceived as a cigar-chomping con man, The Colonel and the King presents a much more complex and nuanced picture. Photograph: NBCU Photo Bank/ NBCUniversal via Getty Images All responsibilities regarding publicity, marketing, record and concert promotion were handled by Parker rather than being outsourced to other agencies, plus 50 per cent of his fee was reportedly pumped back into Elvis's business. When dealing with Presley's tax liabilities – decades before Americans read George Bush snr's lips and voted for no more taxes – Colonel Parker said: 'Elvis and me got one job: to keep him in the 91 per cent bracket. It would be unpatriotic to go below that figure.' Parker is often perceived as a cigar-chomping con man, but The Colonel and the King presents a much more complex and nuanced picture, which will contribute to the story of Elvis haunting popular culture forever.
Irish Times
5 hours ago
- Irish Times
My Sister and Other Lovers by Esther Freud: Tender, fragmented tapestry of memory
My Sister and Other Lovers Author : Esther Freud ISBN-13 : 978-1526685209 Publisher : Bloomsbury Guideline Price : £18.99 No two siblings experience the same childhood. Birth order, timing, parental circumstances, the quality of attachment – these and other factors combine to shape distinct and divergent realities. Add to this the distorting lens of memory and the past becomes each child's unique mosaic rather than a shared family tableau. Esther Freud's My Sister and Other Lovers, a sequel of sorts to her semi-autobiographical debut Hideous Kinky, revisits a complex, peripatetic family. The earlier book followed young sisters Lucy and Bea through a wild, rootless childhood in Morocco with their bohemian mother. In this new work, we meet them as adults still attempting to anchor themselves in the wake of an unconventional upbringing. The novel is a fragmented tapestry of memory, longing and unresolved tension between both sisters and their unpredictable mother. Lucy, the narrator, is lost – isolated, emotionally hungry, endlessly trying to contact her unreachable sister via scribbled notes and unanswered messages. Bea is stubborn and unyielding but equally shaped by their shared past. Their mother remains unreliable, offering only fleeting stabs at stability. Lucy's attempts to repair the relationship between her mother and sister and to establish order in their world are futile and, in a closing scene, she resorts to rearranging her child's dollhouse. READ MORE In a recent Guardian article, Freud reflected on writing the novel while her real-life sister, fashion designer Bella Freud, began publishing autobiographical vignettes on Instagram called Sunday Stories . 'How strange,' Esther writes, 'to read my sister's interpretation of events ... I am tempted to respond, as she must have been doing for years: 'That's not what it was like!'' This tension between versions of truth, between art and life, beats at the heart of the novel. As an aside, her use of the word 'interpretation' may also be loaded, when one considers their exalted lineage. The narrative is ragged and deliberately unstructured, but Freud's control is masterful. Her prose is lucid, effortless and evocative. It captures the slippery, often conflicting nature of memory and the subtle devastation of unresolved family wounds. 'They fuck you up, your mum and dad,' Larkin wrote. Freud doesn't argue otherwise – but she also shows how that same damage can fuel creative reckoning. My Sister and Other Lovers is both an act of personal excavation and a meditation on the potential cost of turning life into art. Chaotic, tender and propulsive, My Sister and Other Lovers is a breathless description of missed connections and half-remembered moments. Like memory itself, it is fractured. And like memory, it lingers long after the last line.
