Sing Your Sadness Deep, Laura Mauro
by Daniel Pietersen
LAURA MAURO • Sing Your Sadness Deep • Pickering, Ontario: Undertow Publications, 2019 • 236 pp • $17.99 • ISBN: 9781988964126
Horror, I often believe, has to have a sense of place and that sense of place, at least at first, has to feel welcoming. The beckoning lamp in a storm, the town with its manicured lawns. We have to feel at home in a horror story because if we don’t then how can horror do what horror does and turn the comfortable into the uncomfortable? Laura Mauro seems to believe the same thing but she also understands the need for horror to push boundaries. So, she takes us one step further and, more than a simple sense of place, employs a sense of places.
Within this collection we have tales set in quiet corners of America and Britain, Finland and Russia and then on into the strange places-within-places; London, a world away from the rest of Britain, and the uncannily delineated realms of the marginalised and the migrant. Mauro’s great skill is to make the reader feel that they know these places until she applies the tiniest pressure and, with the faint crack of something important breaking, we realise that what we thought we knew, thought of as real, was simply an illusion. From the these cracks between expected and revealed reality, Mauro weaves her stories.
In “Obsidian” the cracks appear in the ice on a frozen lake, between the lives of two sisters, across the face of the mirror that separates our world from the world of other beings. The cracks that skitter through “In The City Of Bones” spread to the harlequined skin of Anoushka, to the interference-rich shortwave numbers stations that she listens to through the night. “The Pain-Eater’s Daughter” feels those cracks as they seep from her father’s clients into his own body, as they separate her from her Roma heritage.
Of the thirteen stories in this collection there’s no filler or make-weight additions. I could pick any of them to investigate in more depth for this review and it would be a story worth talking about. There are, however, a handful that transcend the others by doing something quite beautiful; the stories themselves become cracked, allowing a secret story to emerge.
“Ptichka” (“little bird” in Russian) is perhaps the pinnacle of this brittle layering of cracks. In this story we learn of Marta and her desperation to nurture the new life growing within her. Yet her child, diagnosed with anencephaly while still in the womb, is destined to die and Marta, abandoned by both the man who left her pregnant and a welfare system that has turned its back on immigrants, finds her expected reality cracking into something else. “Ptichka” is a story of hope and loss, and of how sorrow is boiled into madness by the friction between them. Marta’s world cracks and, inevitably, she herself cracks along with it. Yet through these cracks floats the vapour of another, more delicate story. “Ptichka,” we slowly realise, is a ghost story. More than that, it is a story about the truest of ghosts; the ghosts not of the dead but of the living. It is a story about the ghosts of what we hoped we might become and what we might yet be. Marta’s story shows us how innumerable lives have, through no fault of their own, faded into the ghosts who haunt this crumbling mansion of a country. How easily, Mauro reminds us, we too could become those ghosts if the sustenances of life — money, friends, hope — were removed.
Similar threads run through many of the other stories in this collection and, eventually, a remarkable realisation occurs in the reader. Sing Your Sadness Deep isn’t interested in the minor horror of monsters and violence but in something far deeper; the terror of compassion. This is compassion in its truest sense, a near-religious “suffering-alongside”, and it’s no coincidence that illness, carers and patients appear repeatedly in this collection. Yet Mauro is not interested in the horrified turning-away that often accompanies the transformation of wellness into sickness but rather the captivated terror that comes from suffering-alongside the sick or needy, the taking-on of another’s sickness. Even “Looking For Laika” — perhaps the longest story in this collection and, with its most immediate narrative concerning the not-weird-at-all fear of nuclear warfare, one that stands slightly apart from the others — maintains a sense of transformative endurance through emotional suffering in the protagonist. The suffering-alongside becomes a suffering-through, a limit experience that creates a new future by cracking open the present. Indeed, few of Mauro’s protagonists suffer the most obvious fate of horror stories; death. Rather, they are more often transformed and reborn; strange and unfamiliar, perhaps, but no less alive for it.
All of this philosophising would mean little, however, if the writing wasn’t up to scratch. Thankfully, it very much is. The reader can open a page at random and find simple, beautiful words. A character is described as “narrow-faced and dark, like a fox in summer colours”. Fish swimming through black water become “a strange constellation.” Pain made into “writhing matter,” “a thick, tumourous mass.” Every sentence in this collection clicks into place, delicately crafted to be as precise and meaningful as possible yet never over-written or heavy-handed, and each of these sentences build into stories that feel tangible in their reality.
Sing Your Sadness Deep is yet another outstanding publication from Undertow Publications — presented with their now-usual eye for stunning cover artwork and design — and one which showcases a deeply humane writer who’s delivering powerful, thoughtful work into a genre where suffering is so often dealt out rather than dealt with, where ghosts are unjustly feared rather than loved.
Published in Dead Reckonings no. 26.
Daniel Pietersen is a writer of weird fiction and horror philosophy. He has a blog of fragmentary work and other thoughts at https://pietersender.wordpress.com/.
