Moses wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, spreading the blood further up his cheek, to his temple. He looks at his disastrous palms. Then — an idea. His thumb reaches as if to remove some speck on my face, but instead he drags it across my forehead. Intentionally. Slowly. What is the opposite of a blessing?
With a penchant for the macabre, Genevieve Jagger has contributed to horror publications like Body Fluids, is the co-editor of Witchcraft Magazine and works as a tarot card reader across Glasgow. These gothic sensibilities merge with Jagger’s own background as a former Catholic in her debut novel, Fragile Animals, which was published earlier this year by 404 Ink. I must also thank 404 Ink for providing me with a copy of the novel before publication, in return for an honest review. Fragile Animals is an ambitious literary debut, tackling issues of familial trauma, Catholic guilt and repressed sexuality. It defies genre conventions so deftly and with such certainty, that readers may be shocked to learn that this is the author’s first venture into long form writing. This is a story that aims to surprise and unnerve its readers, but for those with complicated relationships with religion themselves, Fragile Animals may be oddly comforting with its cosy setting and confessional language.
The story follows Noelle, a hotel cleaner and aspiring poet as she takes a sabbatical to visit the Isle of Bute, seeking artistic inspiration. While staying at a dated B&B, Noelle meets various eccentric characters, including the overbearing host, a perverted reverend and the only other guest at the B&B, a taxidermist named Moses. Initially finding Moses grotesque, as the lonely pair spend more time together on the island, they begin to confide in each other and Noelle’s attraction towards Moses intensifies. Their conversations resemble an atheistic form of confession, with Noelle telling Moses of her complicated relationship with her best friend, who is also the child of her father’s new girlfriend (a woman she hates), as well as her difficulty with accepting her attraction towards women and her childhood trauma. In her youth, Noelle had a strained relationship with her biological mother, who eventually left her family to begin a new life with the parish priest. As Noelle’s own sins around this period come to light, Moses begins to relate to Noelle’s suffering and tells her about his sexually intense past relationships, as well as revealing a dark secret. That he is actually a vampire. While Noelle is hesitant to believe Moses’ confession, she does humour him, questioning how he can eat human food and be exposed to the sun. It seems no coincidence that in seeking inspiration for her poetry, Noelle would begin such an honest relationship with a man with an Old Testament name, bringing her deep-seated religious trauma to the surface, and using it as inspiration for her work, much like Jagger has done herself.
One night, Noelle catches Moses kneeling on the ground over the carcass of a swan with blood on his mouth. Horrified, she pretends to ignore the incident, until the host of the B&B finds the body the following morning. The host, Miss Fraser invites the local reverend over, declaring ‘there were all these feathers all over the grass. White. White as snow. It was a swan. […] But Noelle, it gets worse, because for a moment I didn’t realise it was a swan. For a moment I truly thought I had fallen over an angel.’ It is moments like these that bring Noelle back to her childhood and force her to confront the demons in her past, divulging secrets of her own along the way, and attempting to reconcile with those she has hurt in her own path of self-destruction. As this occurs, the novel splits into two timelines; one telling the story of Noelle and Moses’ sexually charged (and sometimes violent) relationship on the Isle of Bute, and one which delves into Noelle’s adolescence, slowly unveiling the moments which still haunt her.
If you go into this book having only read the short blurb on the back, which begins with, ‘when an ex-Catholic woman develops a sexual relationship with a vampire, she is forced to confront the memories that haunt her religious past’, you may expect a slightly different kind of novel. We are in the midst of a ‘Romantasy’ craze, with books like Ali Hazelwood’s Bride and Sarah J. Maas’ A Court of Thorns and Roses dominating the literary market and BookTok posts. It could be argued that this fascination with supernatural/human romances has hardly slowed down since the release of the likes of Twilight, Charmed, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, True Blood and The Mortal Instruments, and this book could very well be enjoyable for readers of that genre. However, from this blurb, the focus of the novel would seem to be on the romance between Noelle and Moses, when in actuality, the focus of the novel is very much on Noelle’s spiritual and emotional journey. It is an exploration of childhood abandonment, abuses within the church and the effects the secrets we hide can have on our psyche and relationships later in life.
Fragile Animals is a breath of fresh air, sure to thrill genre readers. While embracing hints of the feminist horror works of Angela Carter and Carmen Maria Machado, it is incomparable to anything else on the market. Containing elements of fantasy, supernatural horror and flashbacks that resemble a coming-of-age story, this complex female-led tale is sure to please the most morbid, or the most romantic of readers.
