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Straits Times
19-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Straits Times
Book review: Rose Keating's Oddbody a literary horror collection not for the squeamish
Find out what's new on ST website and app. Comprising 10 stories, Oddbody by Rose Keating features lyrical but fragmented writing with elements of body horror. By Rose Keating Fiction/Paperback/Canongate Books/194 pages/$27.78 Irish writer Rose Keating's debut collection Oddbody delivers 10 literary horror stories with touches of surrealism. Elements of body horror run through most of these, and they are not for the squeamish.
Irish Times
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Oddbody by Rose Keating: Superbly crafted horror stories about having a body and being a woman
Oddbody Author : Rose Keating ISBN-13 : 978-1837261864 Publisher : Canongate Guideline Price : £14.99 A clue – and more than a clue – to the nature of Rose Keating's aesthetic can be found in the title of the fourth story included in Oddbody, her debut collection: Bela Lugosi Isn't Dead. If you know your subcultural history, you will be aware that Bela Lugosi's Dead is the title of the 1979 Bauhaus song that originated Goth Rock. The lyric '[F]lowers/bereft in deathly bloom' gives a fair sample of the foundational Goth vibe. A certain quality of deadpan camp; a theatrical morbidity; flowers, graveyards, bats at twilight, love lies bleeding; a sonic landscape of skeletal post-punk rattle and boom. The Goths – late descendants of the 19th-century decadent movement – are still with us: street romantics of lace, leather and eyeliner, here to remind us that life and death are, if they're anything, aesthetic phenomena. Bela Lugosi , in full Dracula drag, duly appears, undead, in Bela Lugosi Isn't Dead. Bela, or his cinematic ghost, is the intimate companion or pet of a 14-year-old girl, Saoirse. 'We're sick,' Bela tells Saoirse, in the story's opening lines, as they wake up in her bedroom. Mam bustles in: 'Up.' Bela disports himself, bursts, stinks, transforms into a bat. Mam doesn't bat an eyelid (sorry) until, halfway through the story, she finally says, 'I think this needs to stop […] I remember what this was like, at your age […] But Saoirse, I'm sorry. It's not healthy. He is bad for you.' A stricken teenage girl haunted by the ghost of Bela Lugosi-as-Dracula; the whole thing treated, by every character, with imperturbable matter-of-factness, as if it's an accepted part of life, of growing up. The suggestion – via mention of the 'overexposed' photo of Dad that 'Mum keeps on the mantlepiece' – that Bela is the externalisation of unmanageable feelings: grief, adolescent malaise, adolescent morbidity. The story is deadpan, even as more death (in this case of Saoirse's cat, Ginger) obtrudes, even as Bela guides Saoirse towards fantasies of resurrection and repair. Or are they, in fact, realities? READ MORE Bela Lugosi Isn't Dead is a neat example of Keating's deadpan expressionism. The title story, Oddbody, works similarly. A second-person protagonist is followed around, haunted, hectored, entertained, by a ghost; in the world of this story, having a ghost is normal, if socially fraught, like being depressed, or – another possible metaphor here – being on your period. 'Did you bring your ghost to my flat?' asks the protagonist's unpleasant boyfriend, Ben. 'Do you have any idea how inappropriate that is?' The ghost urges 'you' to consider suicide; viciously criticises 'your' body ('Look at the bulging waves of cellulite rippling across the inner thighs'); is, nonetheless, familiar, even beloved. The tightness of its embrace 'feels so very much like being held'. It should by now be obvious that Keating isn't just a prose Goth. Her stories draw on another powerful tributary – specifically, feminist arguments about the fates of the female body under patriarchy. The ghost, in Oddbody, sounds like depression – and the story works beautifully as a dark and funny account of that state. But equally, the ghost sounds like the messages that patriarchy whispers and shouts to women. 'It's not a bad ghost,' the protagonist insists to Ben, 'I'm fine, really.' At one point, 'the ghost has given in to diffusion'. It's everywhere – like depression; like a ruling ideology. Expressionism – see Kafka – works by literalising emotional states or political ideas. The 10 stories in Oddbody are all expressionist in this sense. In the funniest story, Squirm, a young woman named Laura is taking care of her father; her father, formerly human, is now a large segmented worm who lives in a soil-filled bath. Nobody in the story thinks this is strange. 'Is there something wrong with him?' asks Liam, a man Laura meets on a fetish website. 'He's a worm,' Laura replies. Liam, driving them through the countryside, says, 'Look, sheep.' In Kafka's Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa's family suffers social embarrassment at the fact that Gregor is now an insect; Keating riffs on this surrealist insight to tell startling, funny, alarming stories about what happens to our feelings when they collide with the social world, and about how that social world can mould our feelings, especially if we are women. # [ Short stories from Kafka to the Kafkaesque: making strange again Opens in new window ] In Next to Cleanliness, a young woman undergoes a 'cleanse' supervised by a charismatic doctor; it strips her down to her skeleton. In Eggshells, women lay literal eggs; it is a social faux pas to lay one at work. The stories in Oddbody are superbly crafted – though they might perhaps best be read one at a time (a certain sameness is detectable if you read them one after the other). The prose is confident, witty and perceptive. These are sharp and memorable horror stories about the most ordinary horrors: having a body; having a heart; being a woman in the 21st-century West. Kevin Power is assistant professor of English at Trinity College Dublin
Irish Examiner
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Beginner's pluck: English teacher and Waterford native Rose Keating
A prolific reader, Rose has always been drawn towards horror — and as a child avidly read her mother's collection. 'There was a lot of Stephen King, and Anne Rice,' she says. At 12, Rose enrolled on a writing course organised by Waterford Youth Arts, and afterwards, become involved in both writing and theatre projects. 'At university I became more aware of literary fiction, and for a while I drifted away from horror, but I'm back to it now, although my tastes have become wider.' After graduating from UCC, Rose moved to Norwich, but covid struck, so her MA in creative writing was all online. 'But I loved it. I wrote the majority of the stories in Oddbody. We met, casually, once we could.' It was the first time I'd made writing friends — people who were going to be published. She stayed in Norwich afterwards, waitressing and bar tending. 'But I drifted, and didn't do much writing.' After a year, she returned to Ireland. With stories published in literary magazines, Rose has received numerous awards including the Malcolm Bradbury Scholarship, the Curtis Brown Award, and, in 2022, an Arts Council Agility Award. 'That really helped the collection.' Who is Rose Keating? Date/ place of birth: 1997/ Waterford. Education: St Angela's, Waterford. University College Cork, English literature. 'I was on the Quercus scholarship programme.' University of East Anglia, MA in creative writing prose fiction. Home: Thailand. Family: Mum, three brothers, lots of cousins, nieces and nephews, and family dog, Lexi. 'An old, ugly mutt.' The day job: English teacher to six to eights year olds. 'It's the first job that's made me happy.' In another life: 'I'd like to work with animals somewhere warm out in nature.' Favourite writers: Leonora Carrington; Lorrie Moore; Raymond Carver: Camilla Grudova; Satyaka Murata; Ernest Hemingway. Second book: 'More short stories.' Top tip: 'Read beyond what you, yourself, are writing.' Website: Instagram: @Rose_Keating_ The debut Oddbody Canongate, €16.99 A woman lives, uneasily, with a ghost; an actress has parts of her cut off to gain a role. These weird, unsettling stories focused on the body explore themes of desire, anxiety, and shame. How far can the human form be pushed and subverted? The verdict: Playful, funny, and provocative, these stories are strangely compulsive. Rose Keating will appear at the West Cork Literary Festival on Tuesday, July 15.
