How do I start a book review during a pandemic? Why should we even bother? For one thing it is a hard time to be releasing new books. Let’s be good literary citizens and stock up. For another, books are my personal favorite form of comfort. Stories offer escape, though the escape is often not without benefits. We get the pleasure of fantasy, and we’re very likely to learn something about the world or ourselves along the way. Honeybones is Georgina Bruce’s novella set in the house of mirrors she first introduced us to in her story collection, This House of Wounds. I was going to say it is a short sweet read but only half of that is true. It is lovely and perilous. You could read it in a day. I’ve been finding it a good practice, during these stressful times, to step away from the internet—the news and social media especially—and this novella will give you a sense of having finished something, of having spent your time on something that fills you back up even as it rips out your heart.
Teenage Anna lives with her wealthy stepfather, Tom, and mother in a huge and beautiful house. The story begins with Anna returning from a funeral and witnessing her mother’s collapse. We’re invited into a house with forbidden doors, broken dolls, an alluring library, and a stepfather who is both more and less than what he seems.
“He smiled. All the sadness left him in an instant and he beamed at me like he was the happiest man alive. But even then, something flickered about his shoulders and his hair. Something cruel and feathered. Something with a voice like dirt.”
Bruce, a 2017 World Fantasy Award Winner, has a real knack for getting the nonsense of dream logic to make sense on the page. She has such a keen grasp of this dreamy (or should I say dreemy?) world.
“I opened the Velcro strip on its dress. There was a cord hanging out of the plastic casing in the middle of its back. In the centre of its chest, a heart-shaped logo was moulded into the plastic and the words Dreemy Peeple branded next to it in flowery cursive. And then there was the little patch of holes in the stomach for the Dreemy Peeple’s speaker, a robotic voice cranking out its lines.
come and play with me!
let’s go dancing all night long
come into the under the house
it’s a dreemy world for dreamy peeple”
You get to explore this dreamscape (though nightmare-world is probably more correct) and still feel your feet safely on the ground, at least in the beginning. Anna’s mother warns her against dreaming inside the house and implores her to go to the garden to do her dreaming. This is of course impossible. No one can control their dreaming and Anna is no exception.
“It was only a dream, a night time excursion. I was sleepwalking, walking my dreams. I knew I wasn’t there and it wasn’t real. But even in my dream, I was filled with anguish for Tom. I crept from the library, humiliated by his rejection and feeling his hurt and pain. He was so unhappy and once again I had failed him. I was too young, I didn’t understand the things he was telling me.”
Honeybones is definitely a journey to the underworld with its lures, obstacles and imprecations. Anna is a smart heroine who doesn’t get caught in the usual traps. Her senses of observation are keen even when her senses are dulled by drugs and magic.
“I would ask Tom about the other rooms. One night when he was in the mood for telling stories. I’d sit by the fire in his library and he’d tell me what those rooms were for. Who the dolls belonged to. Whose books were those? I wouldn’t ask him about what I’d read. That would be too embarrassing. Tom was a sensitive man, an artist. He wouldn’t want to talk about the things in that book. The grunting and moaning and eating glass for dinner. But the rooms, I would ask him about the rooms. Or maybe I shouldn’t ask him about the rooms. Maybe I needed to check that the rooms were still there before I asked him about them. Because what if he said, what rooms? And I’d know it was all my invention. I made it all up in my head.”
When times are dark, why not go darker?
The mirror house allows us to explore the complexity of teenage sexual awakening and sexual abuse; the draw and repulsion of rape fantasies reminds us of the need to question where these narratives came from. Why do we have these fantasies, these stories that make us so vulnerable to predatory men?
“I was frightened I would hurt him with my delusions. I didn’t want to be a stupid girl crying rape because a man wanted me. Or I thought he did, for a brief moment, while a ghost pushed her horrible hands into my brain. If I told anyone that he’d touched me … but he hadn’t, had he? It was me who had touched him.”
Bruce has gone out on a narrative limb for us with this novella and has revealed something honest about the way these stories, handed down through generations, have mixed up our minds and confused our desires. Bruce’s stories are always dangerous and beautiful and Honeybones is no exception.
Georgina Bruce is casting some serious fairy magic here. Glittering and terrible, a bit sexy and totally dangerous, Honeybones is available from TTA Press (publisher of Interzone, Black Static and Crimewave magazines) who have launched a novellas-only imprint. Available only from TTA Press and internationally airmailed to you (how charming). It will probably arrive while we’re still social distancing and give you something to look forward to.
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