Claire Fuller is fascinated by corpses: by the moment when a supple, beloved body turns into inert, heavy matter. In her masterful 2021 Costa winner Unsettled Ground, adult twins veer between pathos and gawky comedy as they attempt to dress and bury their dead mother, floored by the sheer, awful weight of her. Now in Hunger and Thirst, Ursula’s destiny is shaped by encounters with two cadavers. And as the book oscillates between social realism and gothic horror, these two unruly corpses destroy her life.
The first is Ursula’s itinerant, troubled but loving mother, who’d been busking with her child alongside her since giving birth at 16. Aged seven, Ursula spent an appalling two days stuck in a bathroom in Morocco, with the door trapped by her mother’s dead body after she died of dengue fever. By the time the novel opens in 1987, Ursula is 16, and has been moved between seven children’s homes before ending up at a “halfway house” alongside recovering addicts and released prisoners. She lands a trial job in the postroom at Winchester School of Art: there she makes friends with bold, madcap Sue, who thrusts on Ursula an unfamiliar intimacy, introducing her to her enviably warm and rambling family. Ursula is narrating the book 40 years later, and it’s clear from the start that something will go so horribly wrong between Ursula and Sue that a prurient documentary-maker will end up making a film about Sue’s murder. Scenes from this documentary, Dark Descent, punctuate the book, adding to the sense of foreboding.
Back in 1987, Sue and Ursula are watching horror films with Sue’s delinquent boyfriend Vince and brother Raymond, with whom Ursula is falling in love. They watch The Stepford Wives and The Shining, and when Sue suggests Ursula move with Vince to a derelict house, it’s inevitable that The Underwood will be a suitable setting for a horror film. Thick dust coats abandoned doilies in the “warm and soupy air”. Nothing has been moved since the preposterously named Mr and Mrs Bloodworth were murdered there a decade ago. Ursula settles into her new life, uneasily rooted by some feeling that this is her natural habitat. Her life has been pulled towards the horror genre early, by her mother’s death and then by the care system, and now she’s enticed further by Sue, whose will to destruction becomes ever more intense. Sue lures them all into a seance, then into performing a filmic recreation of the Bloodworths’ murder; she even goads Ursula to choose someone to kill.
In the midst of all this, Ursula discovers her creative vocation carving on a dead tree in the garden, sculpting one figure falling into the open mouth of another, about to be swallowed whole. Upstairs, she draws “heads being swallowed by open mouths, bodies within bodies, limbs that didn’t seem to be quite human”. She’s turning the demonic energy of the house into creativity, and learning to revel in her sense of the appalling porousness of people, asking what it means to inhabit someone else: to haunt each other, gestate and birth each other.
But it’s not enough. There’s a shocking moment of betrayal when Ursula’s secrets are let out – and, even worse, caught on camera, so they can later be broadcast to the nation in the documentary. It’s appropriate that Ursula’s sculpting mallet should become a murder weapon. A second corpse will now haunt her for ever, in macabre scenes involving tapping ghostly fingers and fetid smells. The swing into full horror mode here is an outrageous aesthetic gamble that Fuller just about pulls off.
As in a film like The Shining, there are two stories going on at once. There’s the careful, astute observation of a small town in Thatcher’s Britain and the effects of the care system. And there’s the lurid, thrilling realm of The Underwood, unleashed into the larger world. In The Shining, the horror enables a dual exploration of what it’s like to have a mind on the edge of madness and what it’s like to live in a society haunted by its own failures, all while generating ambiguities about what’s real and what’s not. Something similar is achieved here, in that the social critique never loses its urgency. There’s the feeling that we may all be haunted by the 1980s – when Thatcher’s government began to under-resource the care framework, leaving people unmoored in a system that insisted nuclear families were better support structures than the sprawl of communities. Fuller seems to suggest that horror may be the most honest genre through which to represent our world. Indeed, the documentary here emerges as more exploitative and fake than the horror films – and just as capable of unleashing terrors into the world.
This is a lurid, big-boned, messy, often brilliant book, full of the intense feeling and intimate portrayal of the inner life that characterises Fuller’s work. “You watch because you want to know the worst that can happen,” Raymond says to Sue and Ursula early on, “and if it happened to someone else then you’re happy it didn’t happen to you.” This is a world in which betrayal leads to murder and then to being haunted for ever. Because it turns out that ordinary feelings can morph into horror with awful ease, and after this, any happiness will be illusory.
Lara Feigel is the author of Custody: The Secret History of Mothers (William Collins).
• Hunger and Thirst by Claire Fuller is published by Fig Tree (£18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
