Madness Shared - Reviewing Poly Hall's "Myrrh"

Is insanity something that can be shared? Does bad karma exist and won’t it leave involved persons alone until it is cleared, spoken of? And is the baby-crazy childless woman trope still a thing?

These are but some questions of many which occupy my mind having finished Poly Hall’s extremely enthralling latest novel Myrrh.

In astonishingly short chapters, each one often a page or two long, we follow the stories of Myrrh, who has been adopted as a baby and is looking for her birth mother as a young woman, and of Cayenne, who married a man who has a teenage daughter, just to find out her life is anything but what she wished for. A very ordinary story, maybe happening every day, and yet a uniquely extraordinary tale at the same time.

The interest and attention of the reader constantly spurred thanks to the brevity of the chapters, they assemble the story gradually, little by little, drop by drop – a very effective style through which time seems to fly by while reading.

Myrrh’s storyline consists of an understandable turmoil of having been adopted, rejected and given up at the very beginning of her life, but also of looking "different" due to her Egyptian heritage, of searching for her roots, and the constant murmuring of a certain “Goblin” in her head telling her she’s not wanted, not worthy, not treasured.

Meanwhile Cayenne’s storyline makes use of a less pleasant, rather trite stereotype, especially worn-out in horror fiction thanks to a surge of thriller movies such as Fatal Attraction or The Hand that Rocks the Cradle; the narrative of “dangerous” women who would like to have children, but have none. I have to say this character had all my sympathy at the beginning of the book – the role of the stepmother is a very thankless one, especially if father and child are not ready to make space for her and gaslight her into thinking she is the problem. Every single Q&A website nowadays explodes with people asking for advice on this, and the situation looks pretty desperate, to be honest. I think Hall does a great job outlining this problematic situation, but Cayenne following a mean-spirited narrative, her descending into a sort of madness, a mental illness, like ever so often in these types of stories, put me off a little bit. Still, it must be said that despite all their weak spots, both characters are profoundly interesting to follow.

Hall can definitely rock a psychological horror. The intensity of the story and the psychological dynamics between her characters are as solid here as they were in her debut, The Taxidermist’s Lover, from a couple of years ago. Back then I felt suffocating, I felt claustrophobic reading Hall’s very flawed, very sick characters, each plot a ticking bomb waiting to go off. And off they go since Hall can also rock a monumental ending. I like to read her in a car crash kind of way: I don’t like anything that’s going on but I can’t look away either. A powerful literary skill, for sure. Chapeau!