2 weeks Ago By Anna Bonet
She’s Always Hungry , Eliza Clark’s first collection of short stories, is a mixed bag. The 30-year-old author, who last year was listed as one of Granta ’s Best of Young British Novelists, is renowned for her fearless evisceration of contemporary life, specifically young womanhood. Her debut novel Boy Parts , the story of Irina, a sadistic photographer, was a hit in 2020.
Following that, last year’s Penance was an intricate exploration of true crime that centred around a group of teenage girls who killed their classmate. Much of She’s Always Hungry follows a similarly gruesome path. Each of these 11 stories is concerned with a human hunger – be that for food, sex or power – and peppered with violence.
Wisely, a content note precedes them, advising readers that the collection contains “themes and subject matter some readers may find disturbing”. Just as wisely, a more detailed “content guide” is included at the book’s end. Content warnings have been the subject of culture-war clashes in recent years, but the approach is sensible here.
Clark’s visceral style means she does not hold back. “Build a Body Like Mine”, the collection’s first story and one of its strongest, is a gripping account of a woman’s experience with an eating disorder. After years of weight fluctuation, she develops “a perfect pointy hourglass” figure, with “torpedo tits and xylophone ribs”.
How did she manage it? “For months, I had been incubating a parasite,” she admits. The narrator has now gone into “the worm business”, and is selling them to help others with their weight-loss journey. “Use discount code LoveIt at checkout for twenty per cent off your second order,” is the blistering punchline.
Read Next Jonathan Coe's new novel is a hugely fun political satire of the Truss days The titular story is another intriguing tale. Set in a matriarchal fishing village , here it is the men who are subject to gendered violence. Clark builds on Orkney folklore to introduce to the village a member of the sea-living shapeshifters who kidnap unsuspecting fishermen.
Clark’s descriptions are brilliantly palpable: “It was totally hairless and moist and spongy to the touch. Its entire body was hagfish slippery; smooth and cased in a thin slick of mucus.” The mermaid-like creature entices the narrator to a dangerous end.
Contemporary themes that Clark has written of before reappear: sexual assault , coercive relationships, the extremes some will go to look good. Another winning story, “Shake Well”, begins with a queasy two pages dedicated to squeezing spots, while “Company Man” is narrated by a woman who is living under a new identity after committing a violent crime. Elsewhere lies speculative fiction, including “Extinction Event”, in which the scientist narrator is held on a base away from friends and family, and charged with developing solutions to the climate crisis.
In the totally bizarre “The King”, a “non-human entity” and “member of the master race” works in tech until the apocalypse comes and she can get back to ruling the world, as is her birthright. It’s refreshing to read an author who doesn’t feel pigeonholed by the genre in which she has found success, but these stories feel baggy compared to Clark’s typically razor-sharp approach. But what seriously lets the book down is “The Shadow Over Little Chitaly”, less a story than a list of cringe-inducingly bad mock reviews of a takeaway restaurant.
“They shudnt b doin chinese if they dont know wrf theyre doin just stick to makin absolutely mint pizzas man,” reads just one part of one review. Inane lines like this fill 11 whole pages. This disappointing inclusion is a real shame, as Eliza Clark is a writer who elsewhere has proven her ability to be fabulously entertaining – and cleverly so.
Published by Faber on 7th November, £9.99.
