Domestic Gothic stories where the sinister behind the everyday is centre stage.
Ailsa Cox | Precipitation | Confingo: £6:00 plus postage and packaging.
Reviewed by Paul Knowles.
Cox’s Precipitation is a masterclass in capturing the unsettling eeriness that sits behind the mundanity of the domestic. All three stories in Cox’s collection explore the hidden secrets and unspoken truths, thinly veiled by the routines of the everyday that include book clubs, planning weekend breaks away in the country, jam making, cleaning, shopping, dog walking and grandparents craving more time with their grandchildren. The collection’s stories slowly build up tension like a raindrop sliding down a condensed window on a bleak winter’s day and though, as readers, we know we should avert our gaze and look away, the stories pull us in, and we are powerless as we watch on.
In Precipitation’s first story, ‘Heavy Showers and Thunder’, a former son-in-law drops in on his in-laws after he is caught out by a storm whilst mountain biking in the hills. At first glance, the story seems to be a social commentary on the lack of access grandparents have to their grandchildren when relationships fail between their children and their partner. But ‘Heavy Showers and Thunder’ takes a much more unsettling turn as we are drawn into the world of Barbara and George who are mourning the death of their daughter, Cass, after a mysterious climbing accident. Luke (their former son-in-law) has remarried and both George and Barbara are missing their granddaughter, Jess, who rarely visits them. Cox’s writing brilliantly captures the awkwardness of Luke dropping in on them unannounced; both parties struggle to communicate with each other without Cass. What makes the story a tour-de-force in the domestic eerie is the unresolved questions around Cass’s death and how the characters hold unspoken resentment towards each other.
In the collection’s second story, ‘Stan’s House’, the couple, Fleur and Jon, — an aspiring poet and university lecturer — move to a hillside terrace on the quaint street of Bethel Brow in a former Lancashire mill-town. Fleur’s happiness at moving to the countryside is captured in the story’s opening as she meditates on the beauty of the autumnal landscape that surrounds her new home. Fleur’s bliss is short lived as she has a nasty encounter with the old woman at number 13 who calls her a ‘little girl who has never grown up’. Fleur imagines the range of gothic scenarios that may have made the woman in number 13 so inhospitable. Where the gothic imaginations of Fleur are shown as always being farfetched flights of fancy by Cox’s writing, the real sinister threat to Fleur is one she struggles to see as increasingly intimidating: Jon — who is struggling to deal with his new commute to the university and the increasing pressure being placed upon him by a swelling workload — is slowly reaching his snapping point. The story simmers with domestic menace as Jon’s growing detachment to Fleur is captured in his increasing silence and lack of response to her requests. As readers, we hold our breath as Cox’s story induces the same feeling as waiting for a kettle to reach boiling point, or the slow sense of menace we feel when we are waiting for a summer storm to break.
The collection’s final story, ‘The Empty Quarter’, is a meditation on loneliness, unfulfilled potential and how a home can become a trap that is hard to escape. Jason, an unexpected travel writer, has always dreamed of visiting the Arabian Desert and The Empty Quarter ever since childhood where he watched films of shifting sands with his father in his Morecombe home. We now find Jason entering middle age and struggling to write his second book. He has the idea of writing a travel book, without actually visiting the places he is going to write about and thus needs to disappear to create the illusion of him travelling. He retires to a rundown cottage in the Welsh countryside to complete his book. It is Jason’s inability to escape the cottage — due to the fear that his ruse will be discovered — that adds a sense of foreboding to the cottage and the surrounding countryside. Cox’s use of pathetic fallacy (the trees and bushes outside the cottage are always dripping with freshly fallen rain) acts as a perfect metaphor for Jason slowly unravelling. The story leaves readers questioning what the real emptiness in Jason’s life is.
All three stories in Cox’s Precipitation are slow burners but they had me hooked with their quiet intensity. Things are never quite what they seem, and the reader is left with a sense of uneasiness for all three main protagonists throughout the stories. Precipitation is a collection that offers a masterclass in the domestic gothic and produces stories that will linger in your consciousness long after reading.
Reviewed by Paul Anthony Knowles.