Horror writer James Cooper's debut collection You Are The Fly: Tales of Redemption & Distress (ISBN 978-1905532346, 192pp), was published by Humdrumming Books in the UK in August 2007, and is reviewed here.
Humdrumming Books
The characters in the stories in James Cooper’s debut collection understand fear because they live with it every day, in every sentence. Theirs is a world where madness is never far away.
From the opening, the profoundly disturbing yet oddly poignant ‘The Other Son,’ in which the narrator’s brother believes himself to be already dead and starts to systematically dissect himself from the outside in, leaving piles of dead skin in the bathroom, the reader knows that they are in strange territory, made all the more appalling by the hints of the everyday, such as the detail of the children’s lunch-box contents, an island of the mundane in a sea of madness. (It’s interesting that Cooper chooses to bookend his collection with this and ‘The Skin I’m In,’ in which the narrator Thomas shares Philip’s penchant for extreme exfoliation.)
Classic Horror Stories
The title story features several text inserts, sharing with the reader fascinating – and repelling – information about the procreative and disease-spreading capabilities of the common house-fly, as well as wealth of faecal and intestinal detail which leaves the reader unprepared for the exquisiteness of the final scene. Cooper knows his horror classics: Jud’s obsession echoes that of Bram Stoker's madman Renfield from Dracula, while the shadowy alter-ego of ‘The Marriage Feast Begun’ is reminiscent of Poe’s Imp of the Perverse. But these are thoroughly modern stories, as shown by the brief, brutal ‘Old Dull Eyes,’ in which Jehovah’s Witnesses and other door-to-door pests are given such short shrift that even Victor Meldrew would blanch.
At their best Cooper’s stories tread ground rarely ventured into successfully by his peers; the domestic horror of ‘In Fetu’ is leavened by moments of unexpected tenderness, for all its chilling final line, while the lean, spare text of ‘A Frailty of Moths’ verges on slipstream, so resolutely does it refuse to explain the world beyond the immediate environs of the queue snaking around the high-rise block.
James Cooper
Often Cooper’s narrators are unable to avoid recounting the events of the story, even though they are repelled by the latent madness, so driven are they, equally by survivor guilt and a horrified fascination. This inner conflict immediately builds the stories’ internal tension, and is an accomplished way of starting with a sense of foreboding. So it is with ‘Shortly Comes The Harvest;’ “I should have followed my instinct and intervened in some way, but by the time I had realized just how far Frank’s delirium had carried him, it was too late.”
Cooper’s stories will appeal to both the hard-core horror buff, but also to the literate, for repellent though the surface detail is, the stories are thought-provoking, trying to get inside the minds of the obsessed, the psychotic, and the doomed so that the reader can better understand them. There are moments amid all the fist-in-mouth horror, of unexpected pathos and sheer beauty. You Are The Fly is full of horror, but also wonder. Read it; you won’t forget some of the images easily.
