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Salt Slow is the debut story collection from Julia Armfield, one that blends nature and magical realism with dazzling results. The stories are chiefly concerned with the bodies of young women, and explore both autonomy and human connection. Amongst Armfield’s collection of curiosities is a woman whose girlfriend returns to her apartment as a rotting zombie, a girl coming to terms with her canine stepsister, a woman who gives birth to a sea creature, and a magnetic girlband whose fans morph into monsters. Perhaps “curiosities” is the wrong word to use here, as these characters are almost all fully realized and sensitively treated by the narrative, and provide a solid anchor for the more magical storylines.
The collection begins with the story, “Mantis”, a tale about an adolescent girl who begins shedding her skin, hair, and teeth during puberty. Armfield writes of the girl’s flesh “cracking” and “severing” beneath her clothes, and the pieces of skin and hair that she cleans up from the floor. The story’s climax comes when the girl fully transforms into a mantis-like creature during a questionable romantic encounter with a boy at a party: “It is possible the boy says something, possible he screams. My mouth is wide with anticipation. Not for kissing but for something more in keeping with my genes.”
Like all the stories in this collection, this one has more on its mind than meets the eye. The story is about adolescent transformation and the damaging standards forced upon young women. The narrator describes the culture at her school as a competition between girls to disparage their own appearance, and her molting skin is her trump card. The central character’s molting skin is initially viewed as a deformity, an ugliness that ought to be covered up, but in the end it is clear that the molting was a necessary component of the girl’s final identity realization.
In “The Great Awake”, Armfield imagines a world where everyone’s “sleeps” have taken on a spectral figure and departed from their physical bodies. Thus, each person is followed by a shadow-like figure with a personality of its own, who represents that person’s ability to rest. While a world without sleep actually feels pretty close to reality for many people in the digital age, the story offers unique discussion points about autonomy and the technically non-human, asking whether it’s ethical for characters to kills their “sleeps” because they are so desperate to experience sleep for themselves. The story has many layers, such the attention economy, the fracturing of identity, and the dissolution of peace, but seems also concerned with how human relationships develop within the universe it has generated. The best of the stories in the collection offer this same integration of the specifically human desire for connection and fulfillment with larger concerns about the puzzling universe around us.
Armfield navigates the trials of young women with a poeticism that augments the magical realism plot points of her narratives. Her stories feel especially preoccupied with the connection between women and the earth, both literally and spiritually. The collection is dark in the sense that it participates in the violent occult, but there is also a dazzling lightness to this constantly shifting magical universe, and I often found myself more delighted than repelled. Salt Slow is a really strong debut connection, and a deeply refreshing entry into the genre of magical realism.