How to Gut a Fish by Sheila Amstrong
Review by Gary Kaill
When I was a young teenager, slowly beginning to develop my own tastes and preferences away from the influence of my broader circle, I turned — as surly, pubescent males so inevitably do — to horror. Films, of course, but also books. My Friday nights in the early ‘80s were typically spent with a friend whose father cared as little for the whereabouts of his video rental card as the guy who ran the store did for the strictures of film classification. ‘This is a good ‘un,’ he’d confide, handing over a copy of Cannibal Holocaust. We saw everything. If it was good (Halloween, Suspiria, The Exorcist) we saw it; and if it was awful, or simply vile (and even some of the titles that come to mind are enough to promote a gag reflex) we most assuredly saw it. The BBFC banned dozens of these ‘video nasties’ and we ticked them off with smug delight: ‘Seen it, seen it, seen it…’
The books that I gobbled up were equally diverse — in quality terms at least; so, for every Firestarter or Carrie, there were a multitude of movie novelisations or exploitative hack jobs. (I once worked my way though The Amityville Horror in a week by reading it every day in Woolworths on the way home from school.) A friend of the family took it upon himself to rid himself of a dozen or more copies of a fiction series popular at the time: The Pan Book of Horror. All of this is quite blurry now, to say the least, but my memory of the format is of a mixed-bag compendium, with new editions published annually, featuring short stories by both established and new writers. Only one has stuck with me, and the chill it delivered all those years ago resurfaced vividly while reading the title story in How To Gut a Fish. The story, as far as I can recall, featured a fisherman invited into a grand and mysterious country house who then finds himself plunged into a hidden underfloor pool. The water begins to heat up and, as it heads towards boiling point, our hapless protagonist — hands tied behind his back, minutes from death — is offered a lifeline: his captor lowers a rope. On the end of the rope is a large hook…
There is nothing nearly as classically horrific (or, for that matter, generic) as that disturbing set-up in How To Gut a Fish, and the resurfacing memory is more guttural and instinctive than a thoughtful reflection. But the horrors contained within Sheila Armstrong’s magnificent debut collection are no less powerful for being contained — as they are — within a workaday, ostensibly ‘normal’ setting. These are stories of the everyday, of small-scale events, of quiet lives, disturbed and (often) wrecked by the unexpected. The chilling title story in which a down-on-his-luck fisherman finds himself out of his depth when confronted with the raw violence of a gang of drug-dealers is illustrative of Armstrong’s compelling design. Presented as a bullet pointed instruction manual, it makes good on its title (‘Next, remove the gills, spread them out like red courtier fans.) while building the heaviest dread. It is several pages before there is any mention of ‘The stag party you deposited on the island for a camping trip’, and it is done so casually — and too late in the story, it seems — for it to act as anything other than a prelude to disaster.
Throughout, Armstrong unravels her narratives with what amounts to a winning detachment. She exploits a sinister advantage — you must read closely or miss the switch that has just been flicked. In ‘Red Market’, long listed for the 2021 Galley Beggar Short Story Prize, she provides commentary on the coming and goings of a group of low-level traders and their customers. ‘A prized evening suit, made entirely out of snakeskin, is hung on a hanger above a doorframe’ — so far so reassuringly dreary. But then, again, a tipping: ‘Half an hour late, a blue Berlingo takes the turn off the main road slowly, letting a pair of walkers pass in front of it, even though the pedestrian light is blinking red’. While reading this story here, for the first time in a year or so since its online debut, I found myself having to pause and take a moment. ‘Red Market’ is a story of the worst kind of crime, told with a skilled and fearless eye. Beautifully written, and written with great compassion (a strength of the book as a whole), it would have been a worthy winner of any short story prize. But, still. It is almost too much to take.
Thankfully, Armstrong’s palette is rich and varied. There are more stories here that expose the casual cruelties that domestic and societal dysfunction visit upon the unwary and the undeserving, and they are rarely less than magnetic. But How To Gut a Fish extends its reach, stretches its moral design and, as a result, deepens its connection.
In ‘Dado’, the set-up is once again lightly handled. A community centre, and all manner of activities housed within. A knitting circle, a cancer support group, a yoga class. Armstrong pans in on a group of regulars working on various projects with wood and metal. She is especially good at defining those borders that exist between strangers, and how they can change in an instant: ‘On the way out, a conversation between the white-haired welder and the dislocated teenager dangles over the edge of familiarity with a question about plans for the weekend.’ For a while there is little in the way of jeopardy, but when it arrives in the form of a fatal road accident, the story pulls focus in a way that is both daring and rewarding. Very often, when The Big Moment comes, Armstrong chooses to sneak away from its effect and burrow deep into its cause: less concerned with marvelling at the aftershock, significantly more curious about — as here — the pained histories of those responsible. The book withholds judgement of those who live within it — as I said, Armstrong is a deeply compassionate writer.
In the wonderful ‘Haptic’, a group of young friends and acquaintances gather in a nondescript flat for a birthday. There has been coercion applied to ensure everyone contributes. No one really knows anybody. Here is our modern age, our capitalist rot laid bare: ‘… the friends he had entered the company with five years ago have moved on, tired of dizzying numbers and designated fun.’ A Virtual Reality set — the birthday present — appears, and a rug is pulled. The story ends on a note of genuine magic.
Armstrong wrote the book largely as a complete work. How To Gut a Fish is not, as is often the case, a collection of previously published pieces, and its canny arrangement is testament to that. A second reading maybe lessens the initial gut-punch impact but, crucially, it extends the reader’s appreciation for the whole. Certainly, the opening ‘Hole’, in which an ancient sinkhole opens, threatening those all who pass by, seems to operate in concert with the closing ‘Dome’. ‘Hole’ reads like the best of Alan Garner, a darkly folkloric tale and a showcase for Armstrong’s fascination with the natural world. Give her a field in the middle of the night and she will pack it with colour and incident. A car dazzling a group of hares in the road leads to this wonderful image: ‘One of the hares jiggles its head from side to side like it is trying to shake its own ears off.’
‘Dome’, expressing similar curiosity for the unfathomable beauty of the world around us, is the coda to ‘Hole’’s overture. ‘The tide hums to itself and turns over in thought.’ This is How to Gut a Fish at its most impressionist: the story almost event-free, a scenic traversing of the book’s world, with Armstrong casting her meticulous gaze over her settings, her characters, like a drone flying above everything that has come before. (Those who have been reading closely will find rich reward here.)
A triumph, then. A book entirely of and for the moment, possessed of the courage to document the horrors of a world unravelling and the wit to enhance its unflinching worldview with a wry dose of humanity. The stories in How to Gut a Fish, bolstered by Armstrong’s rangy and elegant prose, vibrate with a potent energy. We will be lucky indeed if we see a finer debut collection this year.
How to Gut a Fish is published by Bloomsbury, 17th February 2022