Camilla Grudova’s Technicolor Freak Shows

By R. M. N. Landry

First, the stories are gross. Filthy, grimy, soiled, gross. I would be remiss not to mention this at the top, get it out of the way fast, because your tolerance for disgust is probably going to determine whether or not you’ll enjoy the sixteen stories in Camilla Grudova’s latest collection The Coiled Serpent. These stories are so obviously and abrasively gross, so full of fecal matter and puke, it’s almost boring to comment on. These stories are also very British, which some American readers (or at least my Anglophobic boyfriend) may have an even harder time stomaching. Grudova herself is Canadian, but her adoptive home has embraced her as she has embraced it: she was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, her novel Children of Paradise was longlisted for the 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction, and The Coiled Serpent was longlisted for the 2024 Dylan Thomas Prize.

But if the disgusting delights you and gleeful satires of the Brits sound like your cup of tea (or diarrhea), this one is for you. Grudova’s stories are surreal, technicolor freak shows, all told with a startlingly dispassionate voice that treats every indignity, horror, or cruelty as a banality.

A rhythm builds in the stories of The Coiled Serpent. Readers almost float atop the stories, carried along on a flood of lists, effluvia, and variations of the phrase “there was.” Characters and plot take a back seat to setting, which is impressively claustrophobic with stuff: everything from chamber pots to cat-fur coats. Half of the stories are narrated in a distant third person, an omniscient and unsympathetic observer who blithely reports, but does not comment on, the absurd. Even stories told in the first person are a bit chilly, aloof. When it passes at all, time passes quickly. While the style is distant from its characters, the prose itself is sticky and thick with details of grotesquerie, giving the stories a strange texture, at once very human and very alien. Skylights emerge out of a rooftop “like blisters on roasted flesh.” A daily breakfast might consist of Yorkshire pudding that is “clammy and soft like the skin of a hairless armpit.”

It’s the rhythm of fairy tales, though there are no princes and princesses here. The little old man hiding in the cupboard isn’t spinning gold, he’s sitting in an armchair, surrounded by rotting apple cores (“White Asparagus”). An expecting couple desperate for cash promises their unborn child to another person, but the kid isn’t picked up upon delivery by a wicked sorceress: the eager buyer moves into the parents’ house, monitors their diet, and regulates their sex life (“The Surrogates”).

As in fairy tales, the children of The Coiled Serpent never grow up. They may age, but even in adulthood, they are all stunted. They live at home with their parents, or they’re condemned to boarding schools and sick houses, or they die. In “Ivor,” eight-year-old students head to Wakely Boarding School, where they will live until they are seniors, literally: elderly men still in their boyish uniform of striped ties and caps, still sleeping with teddy bears, eating in the dining hall, and playing rugby (that is, if they aren’t confined to wheelchairs). It’s a setup that in Grudova’s hands is sneeringly charming, pathetically cute. It’s not the only blow she lands on the British upper class, but it is the most damning.

Continuing themes she explored in Children of Paradise, Grudova is particularly interested in writing about the indignities of menial labor, especially service industry jobs. The labor her characters perform is often tedious and demeaning, but most of all, it is pointless. This goes beyond being alienated from the product of their labor: workers are alienated from productivity itself (paging David Graeber). These are jobs worthy of Sisyphus: the ice bath will always be full of flecks of gray skin no matter how much it is cleaned, the boss will always throw away the dinner prepared for him in favor of a fresh tin of powdered custard.

Grudova’s style is extremely effective in conjuring the nasty, lecherous boss and the obnoxious roommate. In “Avalon,” a bookstore boss has bad breath, beady eyes, and sideburns, and won’t stop reciting Robbie Burns poems and asking the narrator to dinner. A temporary manager at a sauna is objectionable because he has “a blond toupee and always raped one of the girls.” In “The Apartment,” one of six roommates loves to watch meat burn into ashes on the stove, while the roommate of “White Asparagus” clogs a shared toilet with “excrement larger than a cabbage” that the narrator “[chops] up with a spoon to make it go down.” It shouldn’t come as a surprise that many of these stories end in murder.

Several motifs (custard, crockery, eggs, and plenty of bodily fluids) repeat throughout the collection, and objects or names that are central to one story may briefly appear in the next, giving the stories a dreamlike continuity. Settings are recycled too: there are two sauna stories, two boarding house stories, and three apartment stories. And unforgettable images: two characters use utensils to break up feces, two women chop up corpses.

Most of all though, there is plenty of food, detailing feasts fit for r/depressionmeals. A woman who will die in an explosion at “The Custard Factory” eats “rotten, wrinkly apples, brown grapes, cold baked beans she spooned straight from the can, uncooked noodles from Chinese supermarkets, raw potatoes, boxes of cream biscuits.” In Grudova’s hands, more appetizing meals aren’t safe either: even seemingly innocuous salad bowls are laced with abortifacients. Eating is a punishment characters endure, even if they gluttonously scarf down their meals.

The title story, one of the best of the collection, follows three tech bro roommates who become obsessed with semen retention after reading The Coiled Serpent: A Philosophy of Conservation and Transmutation of Reproductive Energy by Cornelius Johannes Van Vliet (it’s a real book, originally published in 1939, with 84 reviews and a 4.2 average rating on Goodreads). The boys are a motley crew, though recognizable as an exaggerated version of anyone who spends enough time listening to the Lex Fridman Podcast. They lift weights, eat steak for dinner, dance to Devo, hike on the weekends, enjoy Greek and Roman art, and eventually quit their jobs to found a start-up of uncertain aims. (Grudova is also a master at capturing Types of Bros—her rendition of the finance-poet bro in “The Poison Garden” is an all-timer.) One roommate, Angelo, sings to himself in binary. I spent a half hour or so copying all the 1’s and 0’s onto my phone to run through an online binary translator. At some point, I realized it would be faster to dictate it to my phone using speech-to-text. Suddenly I was singing in binary too. I usually find flourishes that necessitate leaving the text to decode a bit gimmicky, but the creepiness and elegance of the translated song, coupled with the experience of actualizing the text, made all the more eerie by the simplicity of the numbers . . . it’s a pitch-dark perfect ending to the story.

There are very few moments of human connection in these stories that aren’t punished. To care about someone is to ensure their death. Sex is either transactional or nonconsensual. It’s a grim vision of an isolated world, where men poison their girlfriends and women pimp out their grandchildren. In “Avalon,” Nell describes her coworker who bled to death after a self-administered abortion and then begins her next sentence by saying, “It’s funny . . . ,” letting the reader connect the two sentiments. It’s clever, it’s brutal. Later, in perhaps the most hopeful scene of the collection, she and her new coworker will drown their bosses.

Grudova’s world is too inventive to be ugly, but it is quite cruel. There’s no redemption for this awful world, these stories seem to say, but, if you’re very lucky, you may get your revenge.

R. M. N. Landry writes Book Notes, a blog on Substack. She is from New Orleans.

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