Mayhem & Death by Helen McClory

Helen McClory’s gift for language and her rich, ambitious wordplay make for a staggering second collection

Book Review by Gary Kaill | 27 Mar 2018
Book title: Mayhem & Death
Author: Helen McClory

McClory’s second collection delivers on the promise shown by her first, On the Edges of Vision (winner of the Saltire First Book of the Year Award in 2015), and last year’s novel Flesh of the Peach, where family saga and road trip collided in breathtaking fashion. Mayhem & Death steps lightly between both formats, mirroring the gutsy immediacy of her debut, while the inclusion of the novella Powdered Milk is a stirring reminder that McClory’s gift for story telling is more than up to the demands of the long form.

The shortest pieces here are barely more than a few hundred words, but within the trim schema of McClory’s flash fiction exist stories which stretch and strive way beyond the confines of the page. This Land and The Inciting Incident are finespun gothic horror, rich with symbolism, heavy with dread. Automoton Town recalls Katherine Mansfield’s The Dollhouse and its microscopic examination of social inequality, as a rich family’s new toy (“At first, nothing happened but a faint noise of cranking gears”) comes to life in terrifying fashion. Distinctive Natural Patterns, a sidelong glimpse of a world barely recognisable and an epoch many of us are yet to acknowledge (“At this late stage of the Anthropocene there is no normal”), is the setting for a chilling slice of survival horror.

Mayhem & Death is shot through a clear-sighted and deeply humanist worldview, and fashioned around McClory’s gift for language and her rich, ambitious wordplay. Her depiction of life’s various cruelties is folkloric and pitch-dark. And while the shorter works are uniformly excellent, it is Powdered Milk, at sixty pages long, and its scene-setting prelude Soutterain, that provide Mayhem and Death’s most satisfying moments. In the former, we meet Madeleine, as remembered by her grieving mother: “Like a storm cloud poured into the shape of a girl, able to make a whole room feel atmospherically the tortured static of her moods.” A stark and complex portrait of grief, it prefaces with deep foreboding its partner piece: an eerie and macabre tale of the crew of a mysterious underwater base whose connection to the world above takes an unsettling and unexpected turn.

These stories bear testament to McClory’s growing reputation as a writer uniquely equipped to tap into the dark poetry of the humdrum, the shadowy beauty of the often unbearable day-to-day. If at times the unsettling nature of her material threatens to overwhelm, the book’s deadly serious dedication – 'For the lonely' – should be enough to confirm to the curious reader that each of these stories is an invitation: McClory is never less than a deeply generous writer. Her finest work to date, Mayhem & Death is a staggering achievement – a beguiling and essential work.

404 Ink, 29 Mar, £8.99. http://www.404ink.com/shop/mayhem-death