or originality is difficult. My first impulse was to play with its very well established conventions; that inevitably became a form of pastiche as I exaggerated motifs, images that had already been well exaggerated by two centuries of development.1
McGrath’s earliest fiction takes the form of the short story. Most of the early work appears in the collection Blood and Water and Other Tales, published in 1988. Two later stories were published in 1991, one in an anthology entitled I Shudder at Your Touch, edited by Michelle Slung, and the other in Morrow and McGrath’s anthology, The New Gothic. The latter story, ‘The Smell’, is distinctive for the absence of specific setting, taking place entirely within an unidentified house and involving nameless characters. In contrast, most of the short fiction is clearly sited in time and place. McGrath’s own transatlantic identity is represented in his choices of setting and the different inflection of the English and American contexts. His later fiction draws on the same dual identity: the first four novels are set in mid twentieth-century England; the 2000 novel, Martha Peake, makes the representation of the relationship between England and the United States thematic, and the subsequent fiction is largely set in America. In the short stories and the novels, the two countries both appear as freighted with a textual history. McGrath’s use of parody in the early fiction, his exaggeration of ‘motifs, images that had already been well exaggerated by two centuries of development’, signals, it may be argued, an engagement with the wider implications of Gothic in its different contexts. Individual tales of transgression and decay may point to larger stories of cultural abjection and crisis. Thus, the Gothic themes of these short stories – vampirism; unstable bodies; fears of degeneration; violation of taboo – resonate beyond the boundaries of the fiction. Often they are inflected through McGrath’s own distinctive preoccupations: the problematic nature of medical practice (specifically psychiatry), madness and what it means to be an artist.
The influence of Edgar Allan Poe, whom McGrath sees as a key figure in the development of Gothic fiction, is clearly at work in many of the short stories. Asked to guest-edit an issue on the new Gothic in 1990 for the recently founded literary magazine Conjunctions, McGrath wrote in his afterword:
It is with Poe that we first see the Gothic shifting away from an emphasis on props and sets – dark forests and lugubrious caverns, skeletons and thunderstorms – and towards a particular sensibility characterized by transgressive tendencies and extreme distortions of perception and affect. Poe’s genius lies in his recognition of the sorts of structural analogies possible between the trappings and the sensibility, than in the deftness with which he splices them together.2
The introduction to The New Gothic pays tribute to Poe for turning the Gothic inward ‘to explore extreme states of psychological disturbance’ (p. xi). McGrath’s contribution to this 1991 collection, ‘The Smell’, lacks the comic dimension of many of his early stories and is now described by him in retrospect as ‘a very nasty, very dirty piece of work, almost fecal’.3 ‘The abject’, as defined by Kristeva, is often to be found in his fiction as a mode of representing madness.4 This Poe-esque tale is told by one of McGrath’s characteristic first-person narrators. In it, a petty domestic tyrant with a passion for order and a penchant for abuse becomes increasingly paranoid as he detects a smell that is evident only to him. The other members of his household are oblivious to this smell, but not unconnected with it. Running ‘a stern regime’ and predisposed to punish any infraction (in a manner he does not specify), he begins to sense it after crossing a threshold in oppressive behaviour.5 He wakes his sleeping children to punish them in some dreadful way that is left to the reader’s imagination, ‘watching the horror from somewhere outside one’s own body’ (246). He is then compelled to pursue the smell (‘I was drawn to the smell like a moth to a flame, it was pulling me in’ (246)) to the chimney, where he has already detected ‘a sweet and viscous liquid dripping into the fireplace’ (244). Trying to reach it by climbing up the chimney, he becomes irretrievably wedged, in a version of the live burial that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in her study of Gothic conventions has identified as one of the preoccupations of Gothic narratives – a trope used by Poe, for example, in ‘The Cask of Amontillado’.6
Images of secrets buried or holed up in some way recur in the early stories, and the chimney was to be used later by McGrath in Spider, when his narrator hides his notebooks in the chimney in his attic bedroom. The physical details of putrefaction in ‘The Smell’ recall the oleaginous quality of what Kelly Hurley, after William Hope Hodgson, calls the ‘abhuman’ in late Victorian Gothic fiction, the entropic body.7 What is new here is the self-destructive nature of the experience and the way in which an obsessive desire for order leads to the ultimate entropy of death. The family romance is translated into the death wish in horrifying fashion, with the abuse inflicted on the disempowered of the household turned back on the abuser. The ‘milky feeling’ he describes in relation to punishing the children becomes transmuted into the final simile of the story in this narrative from beyond the grave (or, in his case, chimney), as he suffocates, ‘stuffed up my chimney like a dirty cork in a bottle of rancid milk’ (247). The image of milk points to childhood and suggests some shameful secret which is never divulged.
Jerrold E. Hogle offers a reading of this story informed by his argument that the Gothic reflects the fragmentation of signs and artefacts theorized by Baudrillard as characteristic of postmodernity:
Here is strong evidence joining with Baudrillard’s that a culture of pure simulation, especially when it is imported into the heart of the home as a system of management, is indeed a culture of death in its very efforts to transcend the death of the body and of the self.8
In Hogle’s psychoanalytic reading, the pull towards the chimney in ‘The Smell’ is representative of ‘an unconscious longing for the body and the mother (even in a death wish)’, and the story challenges the reader ‘to consider which is more Gothically monstrous: the reinsistence of the body with its primordial and final liquidity or the distancing and denial of that Real in systematic simulations that once made the Gothic possible as a form of fiction and drama?’9 What Hogle’s highly theorized reading does not consider is another aspect of the uncanny at work in the story: it may be read as one of retributive justice, in which the disciplining and punishing rituals are themselves transgressive and in their turn are punished through supernatural intervention.
The uncanny is ever-present in varying forms in McGrath’s fictions. His English settings present a recognizable England, usually in the middle decades of the twentieth century, but one that is always sinister and imbued with the uncanny. In the short stories, the narrative voices play competing discourses against each other. The homeliness of this England is disturbed by the strange or exotic in various forms; in Freudian terms, the unheimlich irrupts into the heimlich. Scientific discourse, and often specifically medical discourse, is juxtaposed with the bizarre or superstitious, often to darkly comic effect. These stories lay the groundwork for the territory of McGrath’s first four novels, all of which are set in this period, a time in many ways remote from the world of today but within living memory. These settings are not, however, those of the realist novel; they are more akin to a past that is accessed through its fiction. The stories invoke a chronotope, to use Bakhtin’s term,10 that is already highly textualized, but do so with critical difference; there is, in other words, a postmodern parodic quality to them, ‘repetition with critical difference’, in Linda Hutcheon’s formulation.
In Blood and Water, the golden age of British crime fiction is recognized in ‘The Arnold Crombeck Story’, which tells a tale of transgression through criminal ingenuity. Although set in 1954, a decade or two later than the heyday of the genre, it is reminiscent of the work of writers like Margery Allingham, Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie, and provides both a twist at the end and a conservative recuperation of legality, when Crombeck does not succeed in his final fiendish attempt at murder and meets his due punishment. Its villain, however, is also an example of the mentally disturbed murderer who will appear again in Spider and Asylum. Known as the ‘death
