chlorine by jade song and horror as a riddle
this was actually going on my november artlog when i post it later today, but since what started as an aside made me get up and grab a nonfiction book to break out the blockquotes i feel it's better off as an effortpost.
chlorine is a 2023 horror novel about ren, a high school top swimmer who turns into a mermaid. i gave it 3.5 stars on storygraph. it has a strong concept — self-surgery as transcendence by a trans author! same hat! — but i think it falters on execution, mainly because it offers very little ambiguity.
for starters, i wish ren and cathy's friendship actually existed so that their conflicts could make sense; as it stands ren's just a shitty friend. where's the longing if we never really see them interact in a way that's not ren actively ignoring her. but that's just part of a bigger issue i had with the narrative: in general i felt it relies much more on rationally understanding the beats and emotions than actually having them be felt. it's more about teen girlhood hell as a universal feeling than this specific character's struggle and psyche i suppose — at this point write it as a fictional essay or other academic analysis of a case study.
the big thing, the angle this review became however, is that it definitely needed overt supernatural elements in a way that blurred the lines between explainable and impossible phenomena. it can too unambiguously be brushed aside as ren being traumatized and brain damaged from a never healed concussion. along with blunt (but obviously true) statements of how this or that was sexist or whatever, it's just too rational of a book for its own good, like it's scared of being misinterpreted.
this lack of ambiguity is the number one story killer imo. a point that cowan makes in the forbidden body: that often a horror story will be mistaken for a riddle ("i.e., something to be solved, confident of an answer") instead of an enigma ("i.e., something to be explored, though with no a priori assurance of resolution"). he's talking about analysis but it applies to the text itself too. chlorine is written like a riddle that could be very effortlessly explained.
in relation to sealed by the moon, by gary fry, he says:
On the one hand, in terms of a narrative postmortem, we could […] read the story psychologically. […] But if so, again, so what? What does that tell us that we did not already know? That childhood sexual abuse is horrifying and horrific, leaving its victims scarred in ways others cannot begin to imagine, let alone understand? Do we really need this story to tell us that? Because that is what a psychological reading — one that treats Lily and Glenn as riddles to be solved — asks us to accept.
he also brings this up when discussing stephen king's the revelations of 'becka paulson, and later nicole cushing's diary of a sane man, both stories with traumatic brain injuries like this novel, and the latter (which i haven't read, mind you), feels actually very similar in theme as well. here, he says:
Cushing offers us traumatic brain injury as a way out. […] But, if that's the way we want it, we should stop reading the moment Jason tells us, "I let out a whimper and work to get back on my feet". The point of exploring the religious imagination, especially through the horror mode, is that if you think something as simple as head trauma explains what happens next, you should probably get off at this stop.
i want to read it as supernatural or magical realism, but it doesn't seem like the book wants me to, despite a narration that implies ren did, in fact, become a real mermaid. text and subtext are at odds, because the story never gives any signs she is physically transforming in the present / leading up to her tail event; only through snippets of narration where she mentions in passing things of her mermaid life — not enough to be convincing. here, head trauma does explain what happens next, because there is nothing really larger than life or impossible; we get an ending that is textually "see, she swims away to her new life" but can very well be read as "oh ok she might have drowned". that's just rather weak.