Slights by Kaaron Warren, Reviewed
Angry Robot's Lead Horror Title by Aurealis and Ditmar Award Winner
Oct 2, 2009
Slights (Angry Robot Books, July 2009, ISBN 978-0007322428 , 528pp) is the debut novel by Kaaron Warren, whose short stories are collected in The Grinding House and The Glass Woman, and have won both major Australian awards, the Aurealis and Ditmar.
The Dark Room
Stevie is eighteen years of age and she's just killed her mother. She crashed the car into a brick wall, trying to avoid an oncoming car, she tells people. Her father, whom she idolized, was killed when Stevie was nine and it's the smell of jasmine from his garden that revives her from the very brink of death.
Slights splits into a chapter for each year, and even by the time she's turned nineteen, there's something a little bit wrong, a bit off about Stevie. She is anti-social and digs the garden compulsively, especially at night, taking delivery of a pile of manure which stinks the neighbourhood out, and has scars across her face and body.
When the car crashed she had an out of body experience, but none of the commonplace bright white lights – instead Stevie went to a dark room where people tore at her clothes, her skin, her flesh. She becomes obsessed with the room and what happened there, and chapter by chapter, Stevie's 'wrongness' grows.
Serial Killers
As the back page copy makes clear, Stevie is a serial killer. It's a shame that the blurb blows what could have been a slow-burning story, but that leaves the reader free to map Stevie's increasingly obvious sociopathology clue by clue.
"I often think about that place. Their caresses, their worship. I remember the way they touch me. It gives me a slightly sickened feeling, just a cold hole in the pit of my stomach. They touch me with such desperation, such need. I feel great power over them...." (p.392)
One of the most intriguing aspects of Warren's work is that she takes her time explicating the truth and at times comes close to contradicting it through the eyes of other people (the idea of Stevie's aunt telling Alex's story through notes scribbled in the margins of library books is simply inspired) lending the story a fevered, almost hallucinatory air.
Dark Fantasy
Warren peels the truth away like the layers of an onion. Slights is by turns poetic, by turns mundane, and the suburban setting counterpoints the horror. The room where people go when they die is full of those people that they slighted when they were alive. It's a room that Stevie finally admits will be very, very full in her case. It's a memorable image, and makes Slights one of the best of a bunch of very, very dark (sub)urban fantasies in the tradition of Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory and John Ajvide Lindquist's Let the Right One In.
Slights is sure to be an award nominee at the very least, and maybe more. It deserves to be, because it's one of the books of the year.
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