It’s like the joke about the old Jewish man who, when asked why he kept on re-reading the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, replied: “Because I want to remember how powerful I supposedly am.” Except in our case, the book in question is not just Malleus Malificarum, that Burning Times textbook on how to find evil creepy penis-stealing ladies anywhere a dissatisfied guy might glance, but almost every other myth and fairytale going back through time . . . these endless fantasies of sexual lure and betrayal, of cannibal mothers, of lying scolds whose evil words inevitably come true, spinning spells from insults. Sin on legs, constantly on the run from Eve’s legacy: a tryst with the serpent that ruined a previously perfect world by letting in not only knowledge, but death.

And I have to say, after a while, the idea that every woman is a barely-disguised potential monster starts to sound pretty good, by comparison. “Baba Yaga wouldn’t have to take this sort of crap,” you find yourself thinking; or Tiamat, or Lilith, or Echidna, or Kayako. Pretty soon you’re having fantasies of your own, ones which all too often end with you getting offered butter/a delicious life by a sexy- voiced black goat and rising into the dark air on boiled baby-fat, laughing hysterically. Or losing everything and getting burned at the stake, whichever comes first!

Sarah Read gets all this, on a very basic level, and the scenarios she comes up with to combat the all- too-mundane horrors of the world around us burn and shine with a darkness that immerses, entrances, inspires. Her anger and humour are equally resonant; science and the supernatural interbreed freely, spawning all sorts of unique and fascinating nightmares. And all of it reads with the same snap, the same flare, the same gorgeously offhand-seeming gothic grotesquerie: insects and angels, storms and spectres, curdled love, transforming grief. This book is full of awful, delightful things, and I’m so glad it exists, I can’t even tell you.

So read on or don’t, but never say you weren’t warned. It takes a certain type of person to write like Sarah Read writes. Luckily for the rest of us, however, all we have to do in order to enjoy the fruits of her labour . . . is to develop a taste.

Endoskeletal

ENDOSKELETAL

The figures are drawn in yellow ochre, their limbs overlong, their faces drawn as skulls—white with crushed calcite, eyes carbon black with a spark of red ochre inside. Each figure holds an orb-like jar beneath its chin. Umber shadows trail behind them as they march the length of the chamber, deep into the small spaces at the back of the cave, where there is the monster. A mass all in soot bone black, large as the cave wall, covered in a hundred lidless eyes. The eyes are not drawn, but etched into the stone itself.