CAUTION: Contains Small Parts by Kirstyn McDermott

CAUTION: Contains Small Parts by Kirstyn McDermott is the most recent (just, the next is due to come out soon) addition to the Twelve Planets collections being put out by Twelfth Planet Press. So far, this collection has been shortlisted for the Norma K Hemming Award, made the Ditmar ballot — both as a collection and the first and last stories individually — and was shortlisted for Aurealis Awards as a collection and for Best Horror Short Story for, again, the last story. As far as Ditmar voting goes, I'm going to have difficulty deciding how to rank the two stories — "What Amanda Wants" and "The Home for Broken Dolls" — against each other, let alone against the other stories (which I intend to read soon).

A creepy wooden dog that refuses to play dead.
A gifted crisis counsellor and the mysterious, melancholy girl she cannot seem to reach.
A once-successful fantasy author whose life has become a horror story - now with added unicorns.
An isolated woman whose obsession with sex dolls takes a harrowing, unexpected turn.

Four stories that will haunt you long after their final pages are turned.

CAUTION: Contains Small Parts contains three shorter (but not short!) stories and a novella. Aside from all dealing with the darker sides of human nature, there's not a huge amount of similarity between them. They fit together well in the collection, but beyond that, they're probably best treated individually. I'm not even sure which one I like best and I don't have a least favourite one. Looking below, it's clear I had the most to say about "Horn" but it wasn't the one I enjoyed reading the most. The only sensible conclusion is that CAUTION: Contains Small Parts is a very strong collection, which it is.

I highly recommend CAUTION: Contains Small Parts to fans of horror and contemporary fiction. For those scared of genre fiction, the stories could all be taken as magical realism, if that's what you prefer to think you read. All the stories, as I said, deal with the darker side of humanity and none of them are excessively gory (unless you count damaged and dismembered sex dolls as gory; it's kind of a grey area), though some parts might make you cringe. This is an excellent collection and one I wouldn't hesitate to recommend to most people.

~

What Amanda Wants — a counsellor with the power to lessen her patients’ trauma. That is, until she meets Amanda, a girl whose problems she can’t figure out. A dark tale, but a satisfying one. Some of the stories within the story aren’t for the faint of heart but then the faint of heart probably shouldn’t’ve picked up this collection to begin with.

Horn — This story is a bit less straightforward. On the surface, it’s a story about a male fantasy writer whose success is overshadowed by personal loss (which he blames on himself and his writing). But when you look at the details, there's a lot more subtext there. For a start, the writer is named Dermott Mack, although, I'm not really sure what Kirstyn McDermott was saying with that detail (perhaps indicating the gender-flip in the story? There are several possible interpretations). The most interesting parts, to me, were the discussion of Dermott Mack masculinising the fantasy genre with his best selling series about violent unicorns. To me this is either a reference to Australia's "female-dominated" fantasy scene (y'know, for a given value of "dominated"), or to the sort of reception female fantasy writers are likely to receive on a more global (well, UK/US) level. And yet, even as we are treated to a scholarly analysis of Mack's masculine work in a feminine world —

“In his efforts to redress a very real gender imbalance, Mack imbues the genre with a fresh, masculine vitality that has been sorely missing from the output of mainstream publishing mills.”

— we're presented with a fan letter that makes mention of Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, hardly overly feminine works. Is this addressing the ongoing "discussion" of the masculine and violent nature of grimdark fantasy and whether women can write it (they can)? Or is it a grim gender-flipped parody of the kind of comments female fantasy authors can expect to have thrown their way? I also couldn't help but notice some ironic parallels between this story and another novella by the same name written by Peter M Ball and published by the same publishing house. "Horn" gives this reader much to ponder.

CAUTION: Contains Small Parts — a creepy story and a sad one. The protagonist is sent a toy dog-on-wheels one day for no apparent reason. As he soon learns, it’s not an ordinary toy dog and what he experiences is not a random haunting. It turned out to be less horrifying in the end than I expected to be.

The Home for Broken Dolls — This is probably the most talked-about story (well, novella) in the collection, or at least the one I'd heard most about before reading. At the book's launch — back in June 2013 at Continuum 9 — McDermott read an excerpt which was definitely creepy and horrifying. But it was an excerpt that squicked me out a lot more back then than it did yesterday when I read it in context. I think probably because I was prepared — and it only got a little bit worse than that — and because my mental voice doesn't have the same creepy tone as Kirstyn's did at the launch. Anyway, the story is about a woman who fell into collecting and repairing sex dolls. The kind of dolls that resemble real women (or at least pornstar women) and are as anatomically correct as silicone can be. The passage I mentioned above, describes in loving detail the severe damage a particular doll had suffered when Jane, the main character, first encounters her. There are two main stories here. There's Jane's, who is a “Girl to Whom a Very Bad Thing Happened Once”, and there's the dolls who turn out to have lives of their own (minor spoiler). It's all very sordid, especially the parts about what's been done to the dolls — and the implicit questions of why and what kind of people might do such things — but the main thing that squicked me out upon reading was part of an interaction Jane had with another person, rather than with a doll (details are spoilery, I think). This isn't the kind of horror to make you sleep with the light on or check under the table for errant toys. More the kind that reminds you how unsavoury some people can be.

4.5 / 5 stars

First published: 2013, Twelfth Planet Press
Series: Twelve Planets, the ninth collection in the series (all are by different authors about different things)
Format read: eBook
Source: Subscription to the series
Challenges: Australian Women Writers Challenge, Aussie Horror Reading Challenge

Madigan Mine by Kirstyn McDermott

Madigan Mine by Kirstyn McDermott is the author's first novel but I have previously reviewed her second (unrelated) novel, Perfections. I think the blurb (on the actual cover, rather than from Goodreads) of this one sums it up quite nicely:

When Alex Bishop meets Madigan Sargood again after twelve years apart, everything changes. His childhood sweetheart is beautiful and impulsive, but there is something wrong with her. Something dangerous. Then she commits suicide.

Now Alex can't get Madigan out if his head. Is it all in his mind, or is she communicating with him?

To save himself and those he loves, Alex must uncover the sinister reason why Madigan took her own life — and why she won't lie still in her grave.

The cover reads, "Obsession never dies..." and the story of Madigan Mine is definitely about obsession. Before I started reading I thought it would be Alex's obsession at the forefront of the  novel. There is some of that, but the novel is really about Madigan. Although she is dead at the start — the story opens with her funeral — we get to know her almost as well as Alex, through flashbacks and through Alex's descriptions. Alex quickly falls into a relationship with her after she waltzes back into his life. At first he's happy to be reunited with her after she moved away while they were at school. Their relationship progresses quickly, building on their shared history in a way that makes perfect sense.

Inevitably, things change. Alex finds himself drifting away from Madigan as she surrounds herself with models and hangers-on, gets lost in her art and Alex starts to wonder how well he really knows her. But that's all back story. In the present, Alex is dealing with Madigan's suicide and events surrounding it. And, despite not having seen or spoken with her for weeks before her death, he suddenly finds he can't get her out of his mind. The mental interjections in Madigan's voice are written in grey, which is the first time I remember seeing that in a book, and was a particularly clever way of handing it. There is more symbolism in the slightly washed-out words than there would have been in italics.

The first half or so of the book is fairly contemporary — as in, not speculative fiction — although some horror elements do come into play. (There was one scene in particular that had a fairly high ick factor for me and quite definitively sealed Madigan Mine as horror, in my mind.) In the second half, however, more speculative elements come prpominently to the forefront. Although it starts off like a contemporary novel, I don't expect people who don't like speculative fiction to enjoy it.

Madigan Mine is eerie, haunting (and haunted) and intense. Alex's journey is not an easy one for him nor for the people around him. Right up until the end I wasn't sure if he was going to survive the book. McDermott's début is an excellent start to what I hope will be a long career. I enjoyed Madigan Mine a lot (even the cringe-worthy bits) and I look forward to reading whatever she writes next (probably starting with her Twelve Planet collection, Contains Small Parts, as soon as the ebook is available). I highly recommend Madigan Mine to fans of horror and to fantasy fans who don't mind dark themes — aside from that one scene I mentioned, I didn't feel it rated all that highly on the nightmare-o-meter.

4.5 / 5 stars

First published: 2010, Picador (Pan Macmillan AU)
Series: no
Format read: real life paper book (trade paperback)
Source: Real life Australian bookshop
Challenges: Australian Women Writers Challenge, Australian Horror Reading Challenge

Perfections by Kirstyn McDermott

Perfections by Kirstyn McDermott is the author's second novel and has been shortlisted for a pile of awards this year, despite having only been released last December. It's picked up shortlistings for Aurealis Horror Novel, Ditmar Best Novel and Australian Shadows Award Novel. Reading it, the award nominations are hardly a mystery. The blurb is short and sweet:

Two sisters. One wish. Unimaginable consequences.

Not all fairytales are for children.

Perfections is about two sisters, Antoinette and Jacqueline, who live in Melbourne. The story opens with Jacqueline going off to Brisbane for work shortly after Antoinette's boyfriend dumped her. They don't have much in common other than a shared childhood and a mother. The story follows their separate issues as their lives become increasingly entwined.

Perfections isn't what I think of as psychologically-scarred for life horror (a la Slights) but there is a distinct creepiness to it and there were definitely a few disturbing bits. (Not enough to keep me up at night, but your mileage may vary.) For a large chunk of the book I thought it could be classed as the horror version of magical realism but it got a bit too... much towards the end for such a tentative label.

McDermott made me think about the relationship between the mundane and the horrifying. One doesn't have to peel back many layers to find unpleasantness in the sisters' lives, but McDermott keeps peeling until all they're left with is reality (or some facsimile thereof) and each other.

As I write this, I realise that going into Perfections I had little idea of what the book was actually about, beyond that there were two sisters. None of the reviews I read prior to picking it up (via AWW, one, two, three) reveal the instigating event near the start that kicks off the plot. Which strikes me as odd because it's not what I'd usually consider a spoiler. But I suppose I'll jump on the bandwagon; leave a comment if you want to know.

Perfections was an enjoyable read. McDermott is a skilled writer and uses a few different stylistic tools in some chapters to great effect. I definitely want to pick up her other novel, Madigan Mine, and will be keeping an eye on what she writes in the future. I recommend Perfections to fans of horror and speculative fiction generally. I suspect there's much in there to appeal to a fan of dark contemporary fiction as well (it's not that similar to After the Darkness, but if you enjoyed that book and you don't usually read genre fiction, I'd suggest giving Perfections a shot).

4.5 / 5 stars

First published: December 2012, Xoum
Series: No.
Format read: eBook on iThings
Source: Purchased from iBooks (publisher page)
Challenges: Australian Women Writers Challenge, Australian Horror Reading Challenge