Susan Sanford Blades Reviews:

Erica McKeen, Tear, Invisible Publishing, 2022

Jowita Bydlowska, Possessed, Dundurn Press, 2022

What horrors arise from enduring a childhood with an indifferent, at times sadistic mother? A lack of connection with others; a compulsion for self-harm; a sense of powerlessness against oncoming adulthood, self-centred men, monsters? Our heroines in Erica McKeen’s Tear and Jowita Bydlowska’s Possessed both suffered the same desperation for their mother’s attention as girls. In the former, this manifests as a truly visceral, palpable terror, in the latter as a perplexing obsession with an unavailable man.

In Part One of Tear, we meet Frances, who is nearly finished her undergraduate degree and is months away from moving out of the basement suite where she has quietly lived for three years. The narrative bounces between flashbacks to Frances’s childhood and present-day basement scenes, where we get the growing sense—through McKeen’s expert use of timing and foreshadowing—that something sinister is about to happen. Frances is slowly losing the ability to distinguish between the real and the imaginary, the physical and the ethereal. She has also lost any real sense of time; tracking anything beyond the passing seconds and minutes becomes impossible. Through McKeen’s descriptive narration, we understand that Frances is grappling with her oncoming womanhood. She looks back on childhood, when ‘[h]er body is small and easy to move. Her brain is simple and fluid.’ Her present-day body appears ‘mountainous in her view.’ The form Frances once inhabited is changing in a way beyond her control; she looks and feels like a being other than herself. As a woman, she will be perceived by the outside world differently, perhaps as something monstrous. The only way to control this transformation seems to be by starving herself. Eventually, after her hunger drives Frances to attempt to leave the basement, she realizes she’s trapped down there (or is she?) just as she’s trapped in her body, ‘deep inside, watching it happen, watching her shadowy reflection in the mirror as she lost all roundness in her cheeks.’

In this first part of the novel, McKeen gradually reveals elements of Frances’s psychosis, so that we begin to understand more and more about this lurking shadow, this monster at the basement door and inside the basement walls. It makes Tear the best kind of horror— thoughtfully suspenseful, enigmatic without being unbelievable and thoroughly immersive. As the narrative gradually descends into full-blown horror, we can’t help but savour every word in delightful anticipation.

The rest of the novel, told from the shifting perspectives of characters from Frances’s past and present, grounds us back in reality—or so we think. Frances’s monster, a creature that ‘exceeded gender, spilled out from it, overwhelmed it,’ feeds on the internalized rage born of living under patriarchy and exacts revenge on those who have perpetuated its beliefs and inflicted trauma. This includes Frances’s roommates, who lived easily and indifferently upstairs from her, believing themselves impervious to the terrors of womanhood; Frances’s mother and father, who taught her that women are replaceable, forgettable and invisible; and Frances’s only childhood friend, Jasper, who led her to believe she wasn’t real, that she had been created from his imagination for him alone. Confidently guiding us through the horrific and surreal journey of a young woman bent on asserting herself, McKeen is a new voice I can’t wait to hear more from.

Jowita Bydlowska’s Possessed is not as forcefully feminist and, though it does contain a ghost, is not what I would call a literary horror novel—at least not in the sense that every word jumps off the page and grabs you by the throat, which is how I felt when reading Tear. From the first page of Possessed, we understand that Josephine has been rendered powerless to the object of her obsession, Sebastian. He occupies her every thought, she’s forgotten what it feels like to enjoy anything else and, as these things often go, she feeds off of but does not enjoy him. There doesn’t seem to be much to base this obsession on—she’s been on only a few dates with Sebastian, the sex is too rough and he’s made no promises to her. However, through flashbacks to scenes from her troubled childhood, we learn that Josephine’s sadistic mother might have nurtured the masochist in her. Bydlowska starts by laying the groundwork for what could be a psychological thriller, presenting one traumatic childhood incident involving Josephine’s mother and a razor blade. Further exploring that mother-daughter relationship, charting how Josephine’s early preoccupation with her mother has translated into their current relationship, with Josephine’s acting as a negligent live-in caregiver, might have brought this story of obsession more complexity and nuance.

In all of her books published to date, Bydlowska excels at a dispassionate, brutal honesty, which is best exemplified in her controversial and powerful memoir, Drunk Mom. But Possessed reads as the confessional but indifferent diary of a woman who is not invested in her own life or in the world around her, making it difficult for the reader to make their own investment in her or her story. The obsession with Sebastian does serve to expose a necessary vulnerability in Josephine, but the obsession itself never quite worked for me. Toward the end of the novel, we gain the insight that obsession is a disease unto itself—the object of obsession is no matter. It is the silence, the unrequited nature of the coupling, not love, that feeds obsession. And what triggers obsession is the condition of being trapped, purportedly, in Josephine’s case, by having to care for her mother. But in the present day, she cares so little for her mother, wishing her dead more than once (again, the honesty here is refreshing), and offloads her so easily at the end of the novel that her sense of being trapped—and hence, the obsession with Sebastian— seems unbelievable.

And then there’s the ghost. We hear about the ghost throughout the first part of the novel in a way that could have developed suspense. Josephine’s mother is convinced the ghost of a young man is haunting her home in search of Josephine. But Josephine feels as blasé about the idea of a ghost as she does anything else. In the second part of the novel, Josephine meets the ghost, Luka, while on a work trip to a haunted island in Croatia. This is somewhat anticlimactic. Luka is more of a Casper figure, more of an imaginary friend than a haunting presence. The ghost helps Josephine overcome her obsession with Sebastian and has an interesting back story, but I did wonder if he needed to be a ghost, and if we needed so much of him. He could have just as easily been a fellow traveller she meets and commiserates with about obsession.

What I loved about this novel are the sections when Bydlowska’s understanding of human nature shines. For instance: ‘I pictured a guy in a hoodie surrounded by cats, someone whose internet handle had numbers standing in for letters.’ And her incredible descriptions: ‘It was the staying inside and the prolonged baths that turned her into a creature, a wobbly curtain of flesh attached to an occasional bone. It was as if she was slowly dissolving.’ Above all, Bydlowska continues to audaciously explore subject matter that most authors are afraid to approach—our deepest, darkest desires and compulsions—and she does so with unique candour.

—Susan Sanford Blades