Dark desires, domestic angst and the horrors that divide men and women

The new tales I’m exploring are by Celia Fremlin. I recently reviewed her sadly forgotten but now republished novel The Long Shadow, an exploration of 1970s domestic angst shot through with a paranoid sense of the paranormal, and found it a dark, glittering gem. So when Faber announced it was republishing another Fremlin work - her collected short horror stories ‘Don’t Go To Sleep in the Dark’ - I knew my October surprise had arrived.

There’s strong echoes throughout of Shirley Jackson, perhaps the greatest 20th century writer of dark fiction. The mere memory of Jackson’s story The Lottery still chills my blood.

This is the season for spooky stories (Image: free) In Jackson, women are pressured to the point of disintegration by the absurd world in which they’re trapped. Jackson dissected the suffocating sexism of the 1950s; Fremlin continues that work in the 1970s.

While there’s shades of Rosemary’s Baby in Fremlin’s opener The Quiet Game, that’s just cover for an exploration of a young mother being ground to dust. But don’t think for a moment Fremlin lets women off the hook. That young mother wouldn’t be in such a state of collapse without the cruelty of the women around her.

Fremlin eviscerates toxic femininity as joyfully as toxic masculinity. In The Betrayal we see a woman of monstrous dimensions gloating at the death of a lover, yet skewered for her cruelty and manipulation.

Both toxic femininity and masculinity are on the slab in Forever Fair. It asks: ‘What will women do to please shallow and demanding men?’ Fremlin’s stories are short, sweet, and come with head-spinning final twists - rather like those classic Tales of the Unexpected which entranced us on TV in the 1970s.

What’s so powerful about Fremlin from today’s perspective is that she rages at the inequities forced on women in a male dominated society, yet is equally unremitting in her critique of women.

The Irony of Fate sums up that duality - giving us a vindictive woman and a charmless man, both of whom deserve no sympathy.

The New House curdles the milk of motherhood. Is the old maid here a Norman Bates figure? Is she protecting her niece or trying to kill her? Fremlin enjoys perverting all that’s sanctified, in this case The Girl Guides and Women’s Institute.

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Although mostly centred on England’s middle-classes, the working-class do get a look in sometimes. The Last Days of Spring is less horror story, more plangent love story. It explores the dying days of a strong-willed woman gripped by dementia. The horror of old age is a theme repeated in Old Daniel’s Treasure, which treats mortality with the absurdity it deserves.

The Babysitter brutalises middle-class snobbery, through the eyes of a woman who seems the perfect young mother, yet is grossly racist and hates and fears lesbians. She’s trapped by society’s interpretation of ‘what it means to be feminine’, yet she’s happily imbibed society’s other prejudices of xenophobia and homophobia.

Female rage howls from most pages. The Hated House sees women literally tear the world down in fury. In Angel Face, a step-mother is repelled by the milksop of a son she must care for, to such an extent that murder is in her mind.

Angel Face showcases the way Fremlin plays with the weird veil that hangs between madness and domestic drudgery, while soaking her characters in an atmosphere of supernatural strangeness so readers never know what’s real and what isn’t.

While Fremlin often uses the failings of women to explore the sexism women face - which is a strange and fascinating approach in this day and age - when men appear they are often truly terrifying, barely human, creations.

The man in The Special Gift who arrives unexpectedly at a private writing group may be Death, or a figment of the imagination of a woman broken by male society.

In The Fated Interview - very like a Jackson horror story in its doomed inevitability and claustrophobia - a woman already brought low by a cruel man seems destined to meet another man set on destroying her. There’s some similarities to Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat here - which is clearly a good recommendation.

The last story in the collection is the best. The Locked Room - like a number of these tales - plays with the tropes and creeping menace found in classic campfire urban legends. In this case: is there a killer in the house? Or is whatever is in the house something worse, some supernatural manifestation of the cruelty that exists between men and women?

Don’t Go To Sleep in the Dark by Celia Fremlin (Image: free) Our protagonist’s terror is a product of the society she’s struck within - one drenched in hatred of women. Yet Fremlin also acknowledges the damage women can do: the killer in question was brutalised by his mother.

Our protagonist’s inescapable sense of dread makes her a sort of everywoman: “What was the matter with her? Was it that murder in the papers? Some woman strangled by a poor wretch who had been ill-treated in his childhood.”

However, there’s hope in this final tale. A simple act of love extinguishes all the gendered pain which society has allowed to build up and poison us, both men and women.

I keep searching for superlatives to match Fremlin’s handling of domestic horror. I don’t want to say she’s ‘masterful’ - the inherent masculinity would sit wrong. To call her ‘the Queen of’ seems impertinent. I imagine Fremlin’s ghost - she died in 2009 - grimacing at the gendering.

Perhaps it’s best to say that she’s simply unmatched. This is a writer who can take the humble living room and turn it into hell without spilling one drop of blood. Spend some time with her this autumn, let her upend your notion of what the horror story can do.

Don’t Go To Sleep in the Dark by Celia Fremlin is out now from Faber priced £9.99