There is a version of Cornwall we all know. It features pastel-coloured cottages, quaint fishing boats, hidden coves of golden sand and endless summer sunshine. The place that Lucy Wood describes in her second short story collection is different. When the tourists leave, the landscape remains but there are mysterious dishes that rotate on the clifftops, a tapestry of plastic floating on the waves, and empty holiday homes everywhere for bored teenagers to break into. It looks the same, but it feels alien.
The 13 stories flit between people and places, but the sea is a constant presence. Sometimes it is in the foreground, as in the titular story, when a grown-up brother and sister climb down into a cave under a cliff in search of the childhood they have lost. At other moments, as in “Home Scar”, there’s just a “wedge of sea” to be glimpsed between the houses at the end of the street.
It’s always the meeting point between land and water that Wood focuses in on, whether that’s in order to pierce the thwarted masculinity of a frustrated, surfing-obsessed father in “The Life of a Wave” or to unsettle the reader in “Cables”, which takes the form of a brief Beckettian dialogue between two people observing a series of strange holes dug in the beach.
Unlike Wood’s first collection, Diving Belles, which was a series of dispatches from a fairytale land that bore traces of Angela Carter, these stories are set in a world we recognise. However, a kind of eerie tension lingers like background static, skilfully deployed to transform apparently benign tales into heart-thumping miniature thrillers. There’s an uncanny, delicate quality to much of Wood’s prose that belies how difficult this kind of writing is to pull off.
In “The Dishes”, Jay, the stay-at-home father caring for his baby daughter while his wife is at work, hears sounds through the walls and is slowly unhinged by them. Wood leaves room for doubt, though: has he just become paranoid through lack of sleep, or is there a sinister family next door toying with him? In the bleak, sometimes unsavoury Cornwall she has conjured, people are left behind or disappear, unexplained. All that’s left is the sound of the sea, sucking at the shore.
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