Imagine yourself in an octagonal hallway a moment, will you? There are 16 doors in front of you, some of them brightly coloured, some of them with fading paint, some of them maybe touched with a pearlescent moss and some of them maybe flickering, as if it’s some sort of electrical effect, as if there isn’t a door there at all, as if there is just some sort of mirage or hallucination or something. It hurts your eyes like a migraine if you stare too long. This, folks, is what reading the 16 stories in Camilla Grudova’s new collection, The Coiled Serpent, is like.
If you’re familiar with her debut short story collection, The Doll’s Alphabet, you’ll have an idea what to expect (although if you’re coming to this fresh from her novel, Children of Paradise, you’ll be in for a surprise – Grudova’s short stories have a lot more teeth than her novel did, more teeth than a normal mouth can hold).
But we were talking about that octagonal room and all those doors, weren’t we? Some of the 16 stories contained herein are quite short. You have to imagine yourself peering round the edge of one of those doors, maybe sweeping your eyes from left to right until – bingo! You see something you really didn’t want to see – and you’re out. The shorter stories don’t always run the way you’d expect a story to run, in that they feel more like evaluations (what do you think about this expertly designed place in which I have situated you?) than a story which runs a, b, c, d.
Take ‘Ivor’, for instance, which is about the pupils of a curious school. “We are all second, third of even fifth sons,” the story opens. They are sent from year five to year twenty. They don’t count how many years that was. The school is in the middle of the countryside but they couldn’t say where. Like any ghastly public school situation, the young boys fag for the older boys. Ivor is one the older boys (he doesn’t like his toast quartered). There are issues with lice. One boy keeps one in a box and feeds it until it’s the size of a guinea pig. As you’d expect, that mini narrative doesn’t end well. On laundry day, all of the sheets are thrown down the stairwell. Ivor jumps down with the laundry and floats gracefully (although the other boys know that if they did it they would smash their skulls in.
Or ‘Description and History of a British Swimming Pool / Banya Banya!’ which is, as the title suggests, a description of the Victoria Swim Centre and Turkish Baths. Opened by its namesake Queen Victoria (who “was briefly submerged, like a diving bell spider or enormous dark floating turd”), the pool is run by a former Olympian (“famous for breaking the neck of another woman”) and her son, Harold-Ivan – but (as you’d expect from Grudova) the pool has secret rooms, people who wash in mayonnaise, and inflatable castles containing a small population of formerly lost children. If you come to these stories expecting Amphigory, you won’t go far wrong.
You will find odd tales of seaside towns here (‘Mr Elephant’), explosive custard factories rife with family intrigue (‘The Custard Factory), home made computers contributing to outbreaks of spontaneous human combustion (‘The Coiled Serpent’), rooms that may be creatures (‘Through Ceilings and Walls’). Grudova is very fond of lists. She uses lists the way a comedian does (usually mostly prosaic with odd stray elements that shouldn’t possibly be there). There are dystopias in which people are carried off by creatures (see ‘Hoo Hoo’), hospitals devoted to the treatment of menses (‘Madame Flora’s’) and stories of vindictive museum attendants who dream of gigantic fountains to control the sea (‘The Poison Garden’).
We’ve barely skimmed the surface of the fetid pond really. Grudova is a dab hand at fashioning unpleasant images (that stay with you like the memory of an illness). If we dared to offer any kind of criticism, it would be that sometimes the stories feel like postcards from places and it would be … well, not nice, but let’s say interesting from an anthropological point of view to linger awhile and see what happens. We also think that long form Grudova (see Children of Paradise) feels a little gentler than short form Grudova (it would be interesting to see if the nastier short form Grudova could be sustained novel length – but we say that thinking, be careful what you wish for…). The Coiled Serpent has given us enough bad dreams for now…
Any Cop?: If you like the stories of Julia Armfield or Agustina Bazterrica, you’ll get an almighty kick out of Grudova.
Bookmunch 