things we say in the dark by kirsty logan

In Logan’s story, the protagonist is made to act as the spirit medium in her mother’s séance business, which operates from the claustrophobic ground-floor room of their shared home. These two themes are (all too) familiar cultural touchstones like the 1944 film Gaslight make this clear. The second, and entangled, is through a transgression of the safety and sanctity of the home. The first is through a depiction of male obsession and sexual violence. ‘Girls are Always Hungry When all the Men are Bite-Size’ unsettles in two ways.

What is often at stake in the politics of horror is exactly what is being represented as horrible (this is what makes Rowling’s book deeply problematic).

This headline grabbing book should not be allowed to overshadow the role that intersectional feminism can (and has) played in representing the broad spectrum of womanhood in the pages of horror, fantasy and speculative fiction. The recent publication of ‘Troubled Blood’ by J.K Rowling under the pen name ‘Robert Galbraith’ shows just what damage can be done when the vectors of gender and horror-adjacent popular literature are defined by those who weaponize their gender politics against the marginalised. The womanhood they exude is fleshy and hungry, although we are yet to see a fully intersectional representation of womanhood (or, indeed, authors). The women in these pages claim a type of agency (not least sexual) that the horror genre usually denies them. Taken together, this direction in contemporary horror (or horror-adjacent writing) swaps jump scares for the slow burn of creeping discomfit. Things We Say in the Dark sits in the same corner of contemporary fiction as Julia Armfield’s Salt Slow, Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties, and Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts in the same linguistic witching hour as Rebecca Tamas’ collection Witch and the in same crack between reality and fiction as Julia Ducournau’s film Raw. A brooding horror seeps throughout the collection, with stories at turns romantic, sweet, horrible and surreal. ‘Girls are Always Hungry When all the Men are Bite-Size’ is a short story nestled in the middle of Kirsty Logan’s Things We Say in the Dark, an eerie collection that reels in its readers like a spider on her web.

Things we say in the dark by kirsty logan