Ada and her father avoid graveyards, for fear their presence will drag the dead right out of the ground. “All their heads will come up over the soil, all asking to be the first saved.” This seethingly assured Irish debut infuses magic realism with critical and feminist theory, but the generous dose of horror movie imagery brings a left-field project firmly into the literary mainstream. Like all the best horror, it’s an impressive balancing act between judicious withholding and unnerving reveals: you don’t want to go into it knowing too much.
We are told from the start, however, that father and daughter aren’t human, though they live among us and work as healers; they can reach into bodies and pull disease out of the patients they call, in one of the book’s many examples of slippage and projection, “Cures”. Some of Ada’s feats are trivial: charming a sore out of a mouth, so that it pops up on the kitchen wall. Some, like drawing miscarrying babies back over the border between life and death, are beyond her own comprehension. The novel’s mixture of the monstrous and the everyday – Father’s “large hand disappearing inside” a woman “with a papery sound”, then a pair of lungs taken out to rest in the pantry – is startling and uncanny, but never less than convincing.
The story unfolds against a blazing summer, “shadows cast so dark and deep they seem as solid and alive as the bodies that throw them”. We are in an old-timey community, perhaps in Ireland or America’s deep south, where people work in the fields, wear smocks and give each other scoldings, and have names like Arson Belle and Concord Jackson. Folklore bleeds into everyday reality: locals are terrified of the nearby Sister Eel Lake, where a tribe of carnivorous serpents consumed each other down to the last pair of siblings, the brother finally “thrashing in the tight dark that was his sister”. Though the Cures are grateful for Ada and her father’s ministrations, not surprisingly they’re scared of them too – “and while they knew that we didn’t eat and that we aged slow, they didn’t know I stole the song out of baby birds or that Father ran through the woods like a bear”.
Only one man isn’t scared, the biblically named Samson, and Ada begins a relationship with him that wakes her up to her own agency and desire. But like the eel in the lake, he has a possessive, dangerous sister; and like fathers down the centuries, Ada’s doesn’t approve. There’s a sickness in Samson, he says, and sickness – as he and Ada know well, and Freud might agree – seldom disappears. “It just goes elsewhere.”
Several novels recently have pushed beyond realism and enlisted fairytale and folklore to explore the violence done to female minds and bodies: Daisy Johnson’s mythic swirl in Everything Under, Sophie Mackintosh’s otherworldly dystopia The Water Cure, Emma Glass’s language-collapsing Peach. Refreshingly, Rainsford’s narrative is more interested in self-actualisation than in female violation. Perhaps the book Follow Me to Ground is most kin to is Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, another tale of transformation that is fascinated both by female flesh and by what it might mean to escape it. Bodies are everywhere in Rainsford’s novel: seeping, dribbling, twitching, staining the furniture and the ever-growing mounds of dirty linen. They display both the shock of their abject nakedness – “belts of fat falling under their own slack weight and pooling round her waist” – and the further revelation of their glistening interiors.
There is much body horror here, as well as other staples of the genre: the fear of being buried alive and of the undead, the monstrosity of psychic possession (one character takes over another’s body like “a too-big hand in an ill-fitting glove”). But there is wonder and tenderness, too. One of the most striking effects of the book comes from the fact that, far from attacking the non-human others, the locals accommodate themselves to their impossible presence: their various voices, interspersed with Ada’s narrative, add pace and variety.
Again like The Vegetarian, Follow Me to Ground is odd and muscular enough to resist easy interpretation. It can be read on many levels – as a fable about female yearning, or about containment and contagion; as an investigation into toxic relationships or a puzzle over the borders between human and non-human – but it is always singularly and entirely itself.
• Follow Me to Ground by Sue Rainsford is published by Doubleday. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
