In a new collection of short stories, Clark shows off a growing mastery of the absurd, the bizarre, and body horror.
In “Build a Body Like Mine,” a nameless narrator grows a cult following on the internet after admitting she uses parasites—tapeworms—to help her lose weight and stay in shape. In “Hollow Bones,” a young woman recovers on a space station after an incident she can’t remember which left her with a strange, glowing injury. “The Shadow Over Little Chitaly,” perhaps the collection’s standout, is told through increasingly bizarre reviews of an Italian-Chinese-Australian fusion restaurant that keeps bungling takeout orders and might or might not be of this world. The tongue-in-cheek narrative structure and the reviewers’ surreal interactions with the restaurant create a story that’s laugh-out-loud funny while maintaining a sense of unease. Unfortunately, while many of the stories are successfully built on strange and engaging concepts, others have a tendency to end abruptly and without the skin-crawling payout that readers expect from a writer dabbling in body horror, visiting distant planets, and awakening eldritch creatures. When they’re not uncanny or causing a general sense of discomfort, the stories can feel more like vignettes than finished products, blurry snapshots of modern life and explorations of humanity that are over as quickly as they’ve begun. The result is a tantalizing and sometimes uncomfortable book—especially for more squeamish readers—that could have provided more for those wanting an exploration of the base human needs, especially hunger, in its literal and metaphorical senses.
An unsettling collection of stories that solidifies Clark as a writer to watch in the world of horror.