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CLaire Fuller is fascinated by corpses: the point at which a smooth, lovable body becomes inert, a heavy subject. In his talented winner of 2021 Costa Non-Permanent LocationsThe older twins veer between illness and hilarious humor as they try to dress and bury their dead mother, who is weighed down by her terrible weight. Now in Hunger and Thirst, Ursula’s fate is shaped by an encounter with two cadavers. And as the book veers between social reality and Gothic horror, these two uncontrollable corpses wreak havoc on her life.
The first is the traveling mother of Ursula, troubled but loving, who was traveling with her child by her side since she gave birth at 16. At the age of seven, Ursula spent two terrible days locked in a bathroom in Morocco, with the door closed by the dead body of her mother after she died of dengue fever. When the book opens in 1987, Ursula is 16 years old, and has been moved between seven children’s homes before ending up in a “halfway house” with the recovered and released prisoners. He finds work in the postroom at the Winchester School of Art: there he befriends the bold, crazy Sue, who makes Ursula a close friend, introducing her to his loving and traveling family. Ursula narrates the book 40 years later, and it’s clear that something will go so wrong between Ursula and Sue that a filmmaker ends up making a movie about Sue’s murder. Scenes from the movie, Dark Descent, confirm the book, which adds to the confusion.
Back in 1987, Sue and Ursula are watching horror movies with Sue’s boyfriend Vince and his brother Raymond, whom Ursula is in love with. They watch The Stepford Wives and The Shining, and when Sue suggests that Ursula move in with Vince to the apartment building, it’s inevitable that The Underwood will be the setting for a horror movie. Thick dusty clothes were left for dolls in the “warm and soupy air”. Nothing has been moved since those known as Mr and Mrs Bloodworth were murdered there ten years ago. Ursula settles into her new, unstable life because she thinks this is her natural environment. His life was drawn to the horror genre first, the death of his mother and then care, and now he is attracted to Sue, whose destruction is growing. Sue convinces them all to start a conversation, then to take part in a Bloodworths murder movie; he whips Ursula to choose someone to kill her.
In the midst of all this, Ursula finds her work on a dead tree in the garden, and paints one picture falling into another’s open mouth, about to be swallowed. In the sky, he draws “heads swallowed by open mouths, bodies inside bodies, legs that don’t look human”. He is transforming the power of domestic demons into artificial ones, and learning to revel in his terrifying human imagination, and questioning what it means to be human: to abuse, to reproduce and to reproduce one another.
But it is not enough. There is a shocking moment of betrayal when Ursula’s secrets are revealed – and, worse, caught on camera, so that they can later be broadcast to the world in a documentary. It is fitting that Ursula’s sculpture is a deadly weapon. The second corpse will haunt him forever, in a macabre form involving the tapping of ghostly toes and a fetid smell. Going into a dangerous mode here is a beautiful gamble that Fuller is about to take.
Like in a movie like The Shining, there are two stories going on at the same time. There is a careful, intelligent look at a small town in Thatcher’s Britain and the consequences of care. And there’s the beautiful, fun atmosphere of The Underwood, which has been released into the wider world. In The Shining, horror helps to double-check what it’s like to have a mind on the edge of madness and what it’s like to be with people who have their own shortcomings, while creating a conflict between what is real and what is not. Something like this is being accomplished here, because criticism is not wasted. There is a feeling that we can all be disappointed by the 1980s – when the Thatcher government began to use conservative measures, leaving people unmoved in a system that insisted that nuclear families were a better support than the spread of communities. Fuller seems to suggest that horror may be the most honest form of representation of our world. Indeed, the documentaries here appear to be more brutal and false than horror movies – and those that have the potential to bring horror to the world.
This is a glossy, big-boned, disturbing, often vivid book, full of deep thought and the intimate depiction of inner life that characterizes Fuller’s work. “You watch because you want to know what bad things can happen,” Raymond says quickly to Sue and Ursula, “and if it happens to someone else, you’re glad it didn’t happen to you. This is a world where dishonesty leads to murder and then brutality forever. Because it’s clear that common sense can easily turn dangerous, and after that, any happiness will be false.
Lara Feigel is the author of Preservation: The Secret History of Motherhood (William Collins).
