Review: Brian Catling's Earwig

 

If horror is an unknown figure cloaked in shadow whispering mysteries, then fantasy is a chimera, delighting in transformation and delirium. The ever mutation of previously known forms, the infinite variations of the flesh, and the venturing through different landscapes of the imagination. To take the familiar and make it strange, and to take the strange and make it familiar, this is what fantasy does best. Horror is a genre of a kind of dark revelation, the unknowability of the world and ourselves and the dark secret that lay at the heart of our existence. Fantasy is a genre of travel and voyage, of seeing ourselves reflected in the other and reveling in the infinite possibilities of existence. 

Brian Catling’s short novel Earwig is about a little girl who has no teeth and has had an artificial apparatus installed in her jaw to allow her to wear teeth made of ice, which every couple of hours needs to be replaced with fresh ice teeth. She is overseen by a brutish and dispassionate man, who was contracted to be her live-in guardian in an isolated apartment. Her parents are mysteriously absent and he is locked in with her for most of the day, rarely venturing out for necessities. Into their lives enters a strange being with otherworldly powers and an uninvited cat. This plot summary can not hope to contain all the twists and turns this narrative has in store for its readers. Earwig is written in gorgeous prose, has all these wonderful diversions that the book goes on, and has the bravery to go into both taboo and delirious territory.  It is an overused cliche, but Earwig reads like an extended dream, characters floating in and out of the narrative, abrupt changes in location and time, the unreal and the real melting into each other. 

Earwig has something of the strangeness of middle and eastern European fiction like Grabinski and Schulz, it also shares some genes with southern American writers like Cortazar and Carrington. But this is not to say in any way Earwig is old-fashioned or is in any way a work of homage or nostalgia, Earwig is a shockingly original and modern book. I think some would try to place Earwig in the same category as the urban fantasy works of Mieville and Gaiman, but I think that would be a hideous misinterpretation, while they may have similar sources of inspiration, Earwig is just better written and more honestly creative. Catling is an absolute master of prose and just seeing his choice of words and the interplay of sentences is a delight. Earwig is a very poetic book and should be savored. I would not consider Earwig to be a work of horror fiction, but I do feel it certainly will be something that adventurous horror fans would enjoy. Inside this work of fantasy lurks a very dark heart. Sinister figures, disfigured beauties, bizarre creatures, and a subtle layer of violence and sexuality. 

Predatory Mouth: Thoughts on Under The Skin

She is charming, funny, and a great flirt, when she is seeking to trap her prey, the young men of Scotland. But when she is alone, when she is not hunting, she is not able to talk, hold a conversation, or communicate with those around her. She is mute, confused, and bewildered by all the people around her. She has been created to hunt and harvest humans. Outside of her predatory role, she is truly alien. She seems to have been created, a thing made for a purpose. To mimic humans. But maybe the programming went too far and she started desiring to feel what humans feel, to blend in and become one of them. At that point, she had stopped being useful. Already separated by her base natural from everything natural on Earth, now she is also separated from those who created her. On a mission on a strange alien planet, she loses her way. 

Look around. You, as a human are accepted into culture by your usefulness. And everyone around you has strange motivations and unknowable thoughts. Humans are as alien to each other as much as any creature born on a different planet. You eat, you fuck, you defend yourself from others, violently if need be. Looking around at the landscapes that surround you, you feel like you don’t belong here. 

Her crime is in becoming too good at her job. As she infiltrates human society and struggles to seem “normal”, she inadvertently becomes too human. The character is a blank slate to the viewer, unknowable. But she seems to have made some kind of moral decision, she walks away from her mission and loses herself, escaping away and at first attempts to try to engage in what she perceives as normal human activity. Eating, fucking, seeking companionship. But that all is beyond her, she, at the most inner level, is just not in any way… human. She then attempts to run off to seek solitude. 

The film seeks to pull at the heartstring of the viewer, offering commentary on human relationships, desires, and longings. Only to pull the run under any such notions and show all of these normal activities as largely strange and unknowable even to us humans. The alien in the film can not reconcile human nature and behaviors, and neither can we. 

Her behavior mirrors the experiences of early adulthood. The strangeness of sex, the experience of going out to dinner by yourself, the desperate attempts at forming friendships. Again, these mirror our own experiences. But what is “alien” about her is her motivations. The strange black pool in her abode. The slow breakdown of the human bodies trapped in a kind of floating purgatory. The strange conveyor belt feeding the bits of flesh into a glowing red hole. 

She has one or two “wardens” who watch her from afar, presumably to make sure she does what she has been tasked to do. In their treatments of her, it seems like she is not one of them. She is a tool to be deployed for a mission to be completed. It would seem that she is not of the alien race she serves, but a tool formed of biological parts. And her wardens seem to also be humanoid, it can be assumed they are also tools of their masters. Some serve by hunting/trapping, some serve by being overseers of the whole enterprise. It is interesting that the tool the alien masters use for their hunters is… human femininity. Like a Venus Flytrap, she seduces her victims with sweetness and traps them in some indescribable trap. One would assume that the alien masterminds would want the most efficient and effective methods used in their mission. Classic alien invasion tropes like full-on attacks using devastating alien weaponry, mind control, body snatching, etc are not used. Feminine seduction is the tool they use to accomplish their goals. 

So again, we have a film that distorts what we take as everyday human behavior and makes it strange and unfamiliar. Seduction and production are seen through an unhuman lens. The underlying motivations of society are called into question. Again, she is alien to us, but so is everyone who surrounds us. Your friend's and your family's desires are just as strange and disturbing as any alien being. Science fictional tales of alien invasion and intrusion provide a mirror more clear and reflective than any so-called realist work. 

Alejandra and the Alien: More Thoughts on The Untamed

 

The bedroom is reeking. Some kind of mix of rot, old blood, saltwater permeates the air. The sheets are moist and dirty. The bed is a symbol of safety and rest. Of an everlasting place of refuge and security that one can always return to. But what happens when the bed is befouled? What once was pure now corrupted? When one’s trusted partner brings another into what once was just shared by just the two of you? Clean sheets spoiled by other bodies, other lusts. 

In Amal Escalante’s film The Untamed, the main protagonist is Alejandra, a mother who longs for a life beyond her kids and her abusive lover. We also have Fabian, her brother who seeks forbidden pleasure beyond the norms of society, there is Angel, her lover who has a dark secret, and there is Veronica who is lost in the world until she finds something so extraordinary that it makes everything outside it unwanted and unlivable. All these characters are seeking something, they feel a call, a subconscious pull for something more. They go to work, take care of the kids, cook, clean, make love to the same person day after day, do what is expected of them socially, they keep a veneer of normality to keep them going, yet they seek something, no matter the cost, that will allow them to feel alive, to feel pleasure in an existence of drudgery and banality. The Untamed is a cold film, a film where it seems love has died unnoticed some time ago. 

Yet, out of the black nothingness of outer space, an asteroid slowly comes to Earth, crashing into some remote part of the woods. And in this asteroid lay some kind of… thing. A thing more pure and focused than the confused people of the earth. It brings a carnality, unrefined. The animals flock to the impact site of the asteroid... and fuck over it. Reptiles, mammals, birds, all are affected by the atmosphere of flesh and desire that the alien thing brings. Sometime later, a couple finds the thing and hides it out in their secluded cabin. They bring it...lovers. Veronica is the latest girl that the couple has brought to the alien. In it, she has finally found something that is worth dedicating herself to, something that brings her pleasure and engagement like no other lover has ever done for her. But the thing is starting to grow violent in its lovemaking with Veronica, the couple urges her to stop, to prevent this from growing more and more dangerous, and to find it another lover. She finds Alejandra and sees the longing for something more in him and brings him to the alien. Then later on Veronica sees the troubles behind Fabian’s eyes, and brings her to the thing. 

And what is this thing? A tentacled delirium lurking in the shadowy corners of a farmhouse. A thing hidden away inside an asteroid from the furthest reaches of space. The lover that is kept secret from your partner. An object of obsession and lust. A reason to wake up in the morning and continue to draw breath. It is a nightmare of tentacles and a face with no eyes. It is snakes and worms and everything that crawls and is animated by filthy desire. It is the thing inside caves and subterranean tunnels, it is the thing inside asteroids and sunless moons, it is the thing inside vaginas and the womb. 

Everyone who meets the alien is irrevocably changed by the encounter. Their lives are simplified, their desires cemented. They know a happiness that before was unknown to them. Yet the thing is growing more violent in its lovemaking, causing puncture wounds and bruises. But it is never said it is angry or behaving in a different manner. Maybe, violence is tied into, in a fundamental way, desire and sexuality? Maybe we can’t fully love something unless it has the capacity to hurt us? All the characters in The Untamed have problematic relationships. Alejandra’s passionless partnership with Angel, Angel and Fabian’s secret shame-ridden affair, Veronica’s desperate seeking for anything that can match her addiction to the alien. Hurt and loneliness are a fact in all these relationships. What the alien offers is the ability to go beyond, to transcend the disappointments of life. After the alien the kids are neglected, jobs left dangling, relationships forgotten. The last scene is Ajejandra’s son pointing out a mysterious stain on her shirt as she picks him up from school, an obvious stain left there from lovemaking with the alien thing. She feels no shame or guilt, taking care of her children is just something she must do in between rounds of seeing her alien lover. 

It would seem that horror films that deal with eroticism in a serious way is a minor thread in the cinematic tradition of horror cinema, but certainly one the most interesting. The closest film to The Untamed would have to be Zulawski’s Possession, a film about a relationship that is falling apart and the strange grotesquery that Anna takes as a lover as she cuckolds her husband Mark. I wonder what other films would fall into a “female desire of the monstrous'' subgenre if we consider this as such.  I think of Julia in Hellraiser and Hellraiser 2 seeking monstrous revelation and finding it, I think of Thomasin’s deliverance in The Witch through a horned man and a book signed in blood, I think of Antichrist with a grieving mother finding her true self in chaos and evil. I think of how Ripley keeps going back to the Xenomorph in Alien. It seems to be a rare thing, the horror film about women and their secrets lusts, with a decidedly unsympathetic stance against the male point of view. These women desire the rotten, the corrupted, the evil, and the disgraced. The view of woman as home keeper, child raiser, devoted wife, is taken to with a wrecking ball with these films. The plunge into the abject, the worship of what destroys you, is at the heart of this subgenre. In The Untamed, love is a lie, inside we are all alien things that desire and lust after what can never be had, until death do us part.