A bona-fide queen of body horror delves into fears and illicit desires in this engrossing short-story debut

Disgust and delight, it has been said, live in close proximity; in Eliza Clark’s debut collection, they share a home and a bed. These 11 stories revolve around food, sex, gender, power and the body; they veer from realism to sci-fi, fairytale, horror and post-apocalyptic dystopia. This is a book that seems crafted from the stuff of our deepest fears and our most illicit desires. You read on, by turns engrossed and grossed out, as though in the thrall of some demonic power.

In one story, a tapeworm finds a happy home in the narrator’s belly, eating her dinners and keeping her weight in check (“Find me deliciously thin at a Michelin star restaurant, devouring a tasting menu with a wasp waist, never loosening my belt”). Another narrator’s pubescent face, blighted with acne, melts and scabs over after an aggressive treatment found on the dark web. “I feel like I’m touching raw meat and I pull my hands away.” In the sci-fi story Hollow Bones, a rip in the spacesuit of a scientist studying alien cultures allows a luminescent parasite to burrow into her thigh; bizarrely, she eats her own finger as it breaks off after prodding the wound (“The skin of that finger was so thin, it fell apart like stewed meat and slid down her throat just as easily, gristle collapsing with a press of her tongue, and the bone crumbling between her teeth”). The tale ends in her leg and forearm being amputated by a surgical team of fanged and furry creatures. Clark is a bona-fide queen of body horror, sadistic in her choice of imagery, and cussedly attentive to that most mundane and yet consequential of facts: that we have and are a body and, as a result, are always at risk of injury and mutation.