Puloma Ghosh takes full advantage of the mouth’s symbolic potential in Mouth, a debut collection of weird, subversive stories. These horror and horror-adjacent stories are about women, identity, relationships, and the things we put in our mouths.
As I try to decide which is the collection’s most memorable story, I could make arguments for nearly all of them. Mouth starts strong with “Desiccation,” a vampire love story set in a near-future dystopia. It ends with “Persimmons,” a kind of Greek tragedy in which a young woman comes to terms with her dismal fate. The story-within-a-story of “Lemon Boy” chronicles a man whose girlfriend falls victim to rifts in spacetime. The ghost story “The Fig Tree” weaves themes of home, love, familial duty, and Indian American identity. The young woman in the noir-like story “K” investigates a missing student on a secluded, wintry college campus. “Leaving Things” packs a taboo punch with both werewolf bestiality and incest. In “Supergiant,” a woman is broken down and re-designed into a perfect pop star, and she finally experiences what it’s like to be unknown. And while the rest of the stories weren’t among my favorites, they were still engaging and interesting, and they connected nicely with the rest of the collection.
Mouth is raw and base. Consumption and codependency dominate. Everyone in these stories is racing against time (or racing against spacetime). There’s a thread about mothers and daughters, a thread about queer love. Combining them all together: there’s a thread here about not knowing the people we love, and knowing things about them, but not really knowing them, and others not really knowing about us.
“What are you in the mood to eat?” Less asks in the dressing room as she unmakes me. I came to love her because of this intimacy, I think: her hands in my mouth, undoing the seams, peeling back the skin around my synthetic bones. She takes away my celebrity skin and presses on something more common, more like the features I was born with, which were so unexceptional, I hardly remember them.
“Supergiant”
These stories flow smoothly through time, pausing every once in a while for a flashback or a reflection on the current moment. But the narrative trip through “Lemon Boy” took a different route. A woman meets yellow-haired ‘Lemon Boy’ through the party scene, and in successive encounters, he recalls the events that led to his girlfriend’s disappearance. It evokes Lovecraft: there’s an unknowable but dangerous force that only one person can see, and they share the experience with an outside observer. (Ghosh is from Boston, but it’s fun to consider that she intentionally set this story in Massachusetts as an homage to Lovecraft Country.) Where did his girlfriend go? The main character goes deeper into the mystery, but it’s still Lemon Boy’s story. The story-within-a-story frame is often messy or dull, but in “Lemon Boy,” it’s fun and different. It adds variety.
“Persimmons,” set on a distant colonized planet, also has a Lovecraftian quality—not in the structure, but the narrative. (It’s the winner of my "best-story-in-the-collection" debate.) The story’s menacing persimmon tree is a cosmic abomination: It has the power to influence spacetime, it is capable of mind control (both through telepathy and also indirect influence), and it has a cult of followers. It also makes demands, the worst of which is the demand for a brutal ritual sacrifice. But unlike Lovecraft, who uses characters’ interiority to advance the plot or increase the fear factor, Ghosh writes her characters with genuine insecurities and personalities.
“Can’t you act like you want to be my mother, just for today?” Uma asked softly. She wanted to feel like something that could be loved, if only for one night.
“No,” her mother replied, never one to sugarcoat. “I’m sorry. I can’t.”
"Persimmons”
Of course Ghosh uses the phrase “sugarcoat” here. Mouth’s prose is rich with mouthfeel, tastes, and other epicurean sensations. Food also figures in the plot of a few stories. While Uma is forbidden from eating fruit of the sacred tree, other stories take a more figurative approach to “forbidden fruit.” And when the characters consume something they know is bad, it makes for a good read.
There’s fun and freaky stuff in these pages. Perhaps the most defiant aspect of this collection is that Ghosh does not rationalize her characters' flaws. Sure, other writers portray women who are bitter, angry, sad—that’s common enough. But too often, there’s some reason behind the imperfection, and something caused the woman to deviate and become a bitch/prude/snob/monster. Or else, women’s flaws are made to be glamorous, like a woman who schemes complicated revenge or shamelessly commits crimes. Ghosh’s women are lonely, they are liars, they are apathetic, and they’re obsessed, but there’s no other complication that justifies why these women are the way they are. There is no wallowing self-pity, no desperation to fix themselves. Most of them realize their faults, articulate them, and then move on with the story. If anything, the women double-down and stay on the path to self-destruction.
“... he stood a little too close, leaning against the cubby beside mine. He took my free hand and licked every finger silently while I whispered flavors: strawberry, cherry, blueberry, grape, watermelon. It was exactly what I had wanted, and yet I didn’t feel satisfied–only ashamed. When he was done, he licked his lips with closed eyes, savoring the fruit-salad taste.”
"K"
For the most part, Ghosh—a confident writer—doesn’t over-explain her sci-fi and horror concepts. You usually get enough to understand the basics of the creature/science fiction element so you can focus on the real reason for reading these stories: the people. Occasionally, details left me confused. “Nip” traces the decade-ish romance between Lucy and a thing, nicknamed “Lo” (short for Dolores), that takes a corporeal form once a year. But the thing itself...is it shower gel or bubble bath? Lotion? A drink from the minibar? We know that Lo takes up space in a bottle, but that's all. While we don’t need clarity on what that is exactly, the question was a distraction. And in “Anomaly,” a story about small wormholes operated like carnival attractions, the main character breaks protocol with a risk that the story portrays as unusual. But since when have tourists been good at following the rules? Other examples exist, but these exceptions prove the rule. I can only find a handful of concerns about these stories’ internal logic.
What’s next from Ghosh, I wonder? Whatever it is, I hope it keeps the same edge that sets Mouth apart from other short story writers. I like the viscera, the complicated relationships, the sharp bite.
Mouth is available through bookstores and the Penguin Random House website.
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