“Backwaters” is not the kind of book I regularly read for amusement or for review, but this genre has its faithful fans and it doesn’t hurt to try something new, occasionally. These are tales of horror: twelve Southern/biological/genetic horror stories. Several have been previously published in magazines entitled “Dark Dossier Magazine,” “Cosmic Horror Monthly” and “Shadowy Natures: Stories of Psychological Horror.” Back cover blurbs are from fellow horror genre authors who have published books entitled “The Skin That Fits” and “The Haunted Vagina.”
The volume starts calmly enough. Rozelle teaches at Montevallo and has set the stories in Tallapoochee, Alabama, a fictional Montevallo with scenes set in a barber shop and a Mexican restaurant where the characters go often for pitchers of margaritas. There is some amusing satire of academic life: the jealousies, who is publishing enough, promotion and tenure, reliable absurdities.
Out in the woods on Lake Guin, however, a sinister firm called Biolinks has set up labs to experiment with DNA, creating mutations with CRISPR. Biolinks has rooms full of “nano-enhanced” 3-D printers and tanks of a toxic stew which alters human physiology, not only in the generations to come but right now. When a person comes in contact with these waters, the results are unspeakable. Skin sloughs off, flesh rots, sometimes the skin becomes scales, an eye may fall out, and a baby fall out of the vacant eyehole. The afflicted person may suddenly sprout sexual organs all over his or her body. Women grow bigger feet and shoulders, and longer legs, but their heads shrink a little.
One thematic through-line is that we humans are poisoning the earth and even now, creating these problems and monstrosities. Another is a feminist through-line: that men, especially Christian preachers, have been the villains, cruel to women and the earth, and are to be replaced. There will be serious rearrangements of chromosomes. Some men will have the Y chromosome removed. Some of the characters believe men are in fact aliens, “a toxic order, a pestilence, a plague,” a species come from elsewhere, ages ago, to destroy this planet.
One of the effects of contact with the Biolinks waters is that it makes women want to kill. The protagonist of several stories works with a K-bar knife and really enjoys slitting throats, several. There is a good deal of violence in these stories, and bits of cruelty, in one case to dogs, that cannot be described. In fact one character, telling a story says “What happens after that…it’s too monstrous to put into words.”
I agree. But I read through these stories with a fascination—what bizarre turn will the story take next? It was like watching a new kind of train wreck, with turns and inventions I had never seen before. These stories have avid readers and as John Barth once said to me “we cannot begrudge the reader his taste.”
