salt slow

August 1, 2019
Between man-eating insects, a fashionably dressed sister-wolf, and a hypnotic feminist girl band, Armfield leaves no supernatural stone unturned in this dazzling debut. Writing with an elegant and often poetic style, British author Armfield conjures nine uncanny worlds in her first short story collection. And while her tales are notable for their concepts, they don't lack in substance, either. Behind each of her stories lie undercurrents of loss, metamorphosis, and the ever shifting nature of human relationships. The horror of her work comes not only from the eerie occurrences on each page, but also in the relatability of her characters and the connections a reader can draw between their situations and the absurdity of everyday life. In "Formerly Feral," for example, an adolescent girl copes with her parents' divorce, her father's remarriage, and her own shifting identity as she faces school bullies and bonds with the newest member of her family--a wolf. "Smack" also deals with divorce but depicts the breakup of a marriage through the eyes of a wife holding on to her disintegrating relationship by locking herself--sans nutrition or power --in the beach house she and her husband once shared. Perhaps most extraordinary is "The Great Awake," which captures the sleeplessness of city life and the bitter, competitive spirit that accompanies it. In this strange world, plagued by the "removal of the sleep-state from the body," shadelike "Sleeps" step out of their human hosts while the tired people left behind reshape society to take advantage of the mass insomnia. The title story, meanwhile, follows a couple navigating both the salt waters that have flooded the Earth and their unspoken feelings about their future. While a story or two ends abruptly or doesn't delve quite as deeply as the most spectacular in the collection, each piece is filled with magic, insight, and a rare level of creativity that mark Armfield as a fresh new voice of magical realism. Artistic and perceptive, Armfield's debut explores the ebbs and flows of human connection in lives touched by the bizarre.

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Starred review from August 26, 2019
In Armfield’s unsettling, uncanny, and utterly delightful debut, wolves, mythological monsters, and seemingly ordinary girls and women abound. In “Formerly Feral,” a girl’s neighbor from across the street adopts a wolf and names her Helen. When the girl’s parents divorce, her father remarries the neighbor and she gains a new stepsister in Helen, and the two develop a deep bond. In “Stop Your Women’s Ears with Wax,” Mona is on tour supporting a popular girl band making music that inspires violent desires in their young female fans. Black feathers in their dressing room hint at their more sinister true identity. In “Granite,” a woman on the cusp of 30 finds a lover—her first—whose body is slowly turning to stone as she looks at him. The best story in the collection is the most conceptually ambitious: “The Great Asleep,” in which a person’s ability to sleep is anthropomorphized, becoming a separate shadow entity. Armfield occasionally deploys startling, stunning turns of phrase: “Two a.m., the dark throat of summer.” Razor-sharp, stylish, and imaginative, Armfield’s collection is a dazzling introduction to a talented writer.

September 1, 2019
Armfield, winner of the White Review Short Story Prize, debuts a short-story collection that is both provocative and thrilling. A city is plagued with insomnia as Sleep disassociates itself and becomes its own ethereal entity. A teenager going through puberty finds her body changing in very unusual ways. A PhD student scavenges beautiful body parts of men to create the perfect male specimen for herself. A teenage girl gains a wolf as her new stepsister, and their bond grows dangerously close after the wolf-sister defends her from a persistent boy. As a woman in her thirties falls in love, her beloved becomes increasingly stiff and statuesque. A pregnant woman living during the time of the apocalypse realizes that the creature in her womb is not the child she expected. Armfield's collection is exemplary as she pushes the limits of reality into beautifully eerie and unsettling worlds. She blends elements of horror, science fiction, mythology, and feminism in a way that is sure to shock and amaze readers of short fiction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)