“Spaces are meant to be filled,” Livia Llewellyn writes in “Panopticon,” the opening story of her mesmerizing new collection, Furnace, out now from Word Horde Books. It’s all the tension and longing implied in that sentence that serves as the fuel for her unique and unsettling brand of fiction. Beauty and horror mingle, flirt, and ultimately synthesize in these 13 tales, creating a surreal atmosphere where reality is as malleable as flesh and bone and the erotic comes with a heavy dose of the grotesque.
Llewellyn’s work has been compared to H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. There are homages to these writers, but somehow these comparisons seem reductive. Her work goes where Lovecraft, with all of his fears and phobias, would never dare. She treats her characters with more care and grace than Ligotti has any interest in doing. The secret ingredient here is sex; usually raw and immediate, and it moves like a current through her stories. In this way, her work is more reminiscent of early Clive Barker; but for the most part it’s untethered from any recognizable reality. Instead, it’s set up to allow a reality where dislocation, dread, and lust all mingle to create a singular reading experience.
These include stories like “In the Court of King Cupressaceae, 1982” —yes, get your dictionary out for some of these titles if you want to get the full experience– which opens in the familiar locale of a college campus, but quickly moves to the realm of the fantastic. College student Severin seeks a deeper sexual experience than even her fey lover, Knox, can provide her, and that desire thrusts her into an erotic journey with the eternal. Or the story, “And Love Shall Have No Dominion,” a tale about a demon’s obsession with a woman, told from the demon’s point of view. The demon is all sensation and desire, and it is that passion that draws us in to sympathize with it, even as his obsession turns dangerous and violent.
Sometimes her sensuous style can be totally bewildering, but when the stories are alive enough, I was willing to surrender my expectations and give in to Llewellyn’s vision. Her mastery of both image and language are capable of delivering shocks to the system. “It Feels Better Biting Down,” introduces us to twin sisters, identical down to the vestigial fingers they share on all four hands. But a random encounter with a woman living in the house next door, precipitated by a droning lawnmower, has the twins finding that even they aren’t certain where one ends and the other begins.
When she does return to more familiar environs her work is never diminished. In “The Last, Clean, Bright Summer,” Llewellyn uses the journal entry style of Young Adult fiction, bending it to her own sinister aims, where a summer vacation with the family turns into a horrifying and graphic exploration of sex, masculinity, and tradition. “Wasp and Snake,” a retelling of the Aesop fable, features a bio-mechanical, inter-dimensional stinger, and a wonderful twist on the typical revenge story.
And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention “The Unattainable,” the only non-horror story in the collection; a tale that shouldn’t fit, but somehow does. All of the themes from the earlier stories are present here; desire, dislocation, and sex as something violent and transgressive. Freed from the expectations of the supernatural, we get a highly charged story of a woman seeking control in her life and a cowboy seeking the relief of giving himself over.
Ultimately, it’s Llewellyn’s ability to meld so many seemingly contradictory emotions that makes her fiction so special and such a thrill to read. Her writing is at its most powerful when it stretches the fabric of reality, leaving the reader with nothing left to hold onto but impression and sensation; like the memory of an experience – erotic, horrible, sublime – that stubbornly refuses to fade.
