Jenn Ashworth

When Lola was 14 her best friend, Chloe, died. The authorities determined Chloe and her older boyfriend killed themselves after Chloe’s parents found out about the relationship, but Lola always knew the truth. In the decade that passed, Lola and Chloe’s other friend Emma went their separate ways while the community romanticized Chloe’s story. With the community having raised funds for a memorial, a local TV station broadcasts the groundbreaking which leads to the shocking discovery of show more a body. But Lola isn’t shocked as she watches on TV; she knows all the details and begins to reflect on what happened all those years ago.
Cold Light is told in both present time and Lola’s reflections of what happened when she was 14; thus, the story is partly a mystery, but primarily a story of the dynamic between three teenage girls. The mystery is by far the weaker plot. The ending, which revealed all, struck me as far-fetched and reframed my entire opinion of Lola who turned out to be quite the unreliable (or at least not very forthcoming) narrator. However, I entirely enjoyed the story of the teenagers who fought with each other and their parents, who broke the rules and sometimes suffered the consequences, and who sought love and approval in the wrong places. show less

Fell is beautifully written and was a pleasure to read. Jenn Ashworth creates many haunting, beautiful and vivid pictures and has a wonderful way with words. I particularly loved how the house was portrayed, the descriptions of the decaying house really brought the place to life. But, I struggled to connect to her characters. The characters were individual enough but I couldn't picture them, I couldn't relate to them or get to know them on the level that I felt was needed. They were, show more literally, characters on the page, they didn't have enough substance or colour to make them stand out.

The book is narrated by the ghosts of the main characters parents and although I did enjoy them taking me through their lives, I found them rather flat and emotionless at times. The distance between them and what they were watching felt huge, like they weren't a part of what they were reliving, I wanted more emotion from them. It was like they were watching someone else's lives, reliving someone else's memories, not their own.

I am left with many questions. Every page read as though it was floating on the surface of something deeper. The book doesn't tell a full story, nor does it give me enough to fill in the gaps. Who is Tim really? What exactly is this strange power he has? What happened to Annette between then and now to make her the way she is? What was the fortune teller hinting at with Annette and her gifts? Is Annette's gift part of what drew her parents back? What was it that Tim saw in Annette?

I kept reading on expecting to learn more, to have answers to these questions. I set my hopes on there being some big finale that rounded everything off in the end, but the story just kind of fizzled out.

Fell wasn't an awful read, the writing alone was worth the time invested but the story itself felt superficial. Rather than having experienced a journey along with the characters, I feel instead that I was sat on the sidelines, watching their life story through a window. show less

This is why I love book groups: they draw your attention to books you might otherwise never have discovered.

What's it about?

Jenn Ashworth's debut novel, 'A kind of Intimacy', stars Annie, a lonely, obese woman who narrates her increasingly awkward attempts to build a new life and get to know her new neighbours - without revealing too much about her past.

I found the blurb intriguing and the opening lines drew me in:

"After the van had been loaded and sent on its way I took off all my clothes show more and kicked the sofa I was about to abandon. Not just a little kick either. I really belted it."

Annie isn't just abandoning a sofa. Gradually, through her recollection of the past and her inadvertent admissions to her neighbours, she reveals a darkly disturbing history and, more frighteningly, a deeply deluded sense of her self and her interactions with the world. From her early attempts to seduce the milkman to her unjustifiable conviction that next-door neighbour Neil is preparing to leave his sexy young girlfriend, Lucy, for her, Annie reads the world around her as she wishes it was, twisting evidence in ways that are occasionally astonishing. (Noisy sex next door? It must be Neil's way of letting Lucy down gently.)

What's it like?

The gaps between Annie's narrative and the reality the reader can perceive initially create sympathy, especially as the other characters can be distinctly unsympathetic - Lucy is cruel about Annie's weight, neighbourhood watch member Sangita is a gossip - but as time draws on, Annie's misinterpretation takes a darker turn and her deliberate obtuseness becomes horrifying.

It might sound odd to say that I enjoyed this, and perhaps I mostly mean that I enjoy thinking over the whole conceit in retrospect. While reading, I wondered how far Annie really was self-aware and conscious of the narrative she was spinning; by the end of the novel it seemed unbelievable that she could really believe what she was saying. That isn't to say that I thought the book was flawed. Actually, the ending is so effective because all the preceding events help the reader to understand that Annie's insistent lack of awareness is not pathetic or sad but dangerous.

Unusually, I felt the praise on the back cover was entirely justified. Alison Flood from The Guardian notes that 'A kind of intimacy' has been compared to 'Notes on a Scandal' by Zoë Heller, which is entirely appropriate (and another book I absolutely loved). The blurb suggests that Annie has "too much in common with the rest of us to be written off as a monster" and I suspect this is what makes both books so powerful. It is easy to build small interactions into intensely significant ones if you are feeling particularly vulnerable for whatever reason. It is more difficult to be bothered to eat well if you're persistently cooking - or, eventually, microwaving - for one. These small truths make us feel that we can understand some of Annie's world, that she is not an Evil Monster, but an ordinary person gone badly awry.

Annie's narrative voice is very engaging and easy to read; despite being chronically short of time I finished the book within a few days because it was so easy to pick up and slip back into her world. The ending is dramatic, perhaps overly so for some readers, but I felt that it worked well with the preceding material and I liked that there was a definite closure to the novel.

Final thoughts

I really enjoyed Ashworth's debut novel and will be keeping an eye out for 'A Cold Light', her second novel, which has an almost equally intriguing premise. Reading this has also made me want to re-read 'Notes on a Scandal', though this will have to wait until I have made a respectable indentation in the 'borrowed' section of my TBR pile.

Some readers have complained that Annie's malaise is too obvious, seen too quickly, and removes doubt from the reader's mind. I disagree that it should be hidden; by introducing Annie's deluded perspective early on the reader isn't wondering whether or not she can be trusted, instead they are wondering with increasing urgency what she has done (does she have a daughter? If so, where is she?) and what she might do yet. This creates a great deal more tension than simply wondering whether or not Annie can be trusted.

Ashworth has been commended for her comic gifts and there is dark humour here, but it's more shake-your-head-in-mildly-amused-disbelief than ooh-that's-funny-but-a-bit-naughty-so-I-shouldn't-laugh-at-it-really. Amusing, but not laugh-out-loud funny. This isn't intended as a criticism, simply an observation that I would market his book based on its narrative strength and dark tone rather than its comic aspect. (Besides which, I always find this kind of "comedy" deeply uncomfortable as you are being encouraged to laugh at someone who is clearly Not Quite Right.)

In short, I highly recommended 'A kind of Intimacy' if you enjoy reading unreliable narrators, novels which focus on personal relationships and / or darkly comic stories. show less

I had high hopes for this anthology based on the first three excellent stories but it rather drifts down hill after that. The premise is a good one - that folk horror has looked at the working class as the 'other', often in negative terms, and that a correction is worth making.

The introduction is a solid and thoughtful explanation of where the book is coming although it presages the book by declining into a bit of a rant towards the end. Is this a book about the working class or about the show more frustrated outrage of would-be escapees from that class with literary aspirations?

Over half the authors are women which should be a fair and good thing but some of them have confused feminist politics with working class politics. The portrayal of men in these pieces is certainly not providing much in the way of solidarity.

The Editor, Hollie Starling, provides a well written story but it is of this type. Its link to folk horror is tenuous to say the least. It is an aggressive and murderous piece of science fiction horror masquerading as folk in which ball-cutting revenge by a sex bot is riddled with hatred.

Most of the stories are fine if not inspiring, although the last two are literary to the point of self-indulgence (witchery in Hastings) or obscurity. This last - 'It Fair Give Me The Spikes' by Tom Benn - is a linguistically accomplished ghost story marred by its sustained incomprehensibility.

Earlier than this, there is a weird fantasy response to 'The Wicker Man' from a quasi-class angle (Cornish fisher folk in this case) that actually ends up with something that might be classed as a 'happy ending'. Happy endings are not part of the genre description.

So, let us praise the first three stories as well above the average, worth considering for future anthologies. In these stories, the authors maintain both the horror and the ordinariness of existence and some decent relation to the genre they are supposed to be emulating.

The first is the best - 'The Ossuary' by A. K Blakemore - which is rather subversive of the Editor's avowed intent. The publisher might have hoped (from the blurb) that we would despise the aged prejudiced guardian of bones but Blakemore presents her with real sympathy.

It is a subtle story in which the pricks are the liberal leftie children who are pompous and callous while two urban Asians behave unpleasantly amongst her bones. She is a cultural dinosaur doomed to extinction but she is also a person. Blakemore treats her as such.

Daniel Draper's 'Perpetual Stew' could so easily have gone wrong with its outrageous premise of a mining village held together by grand guignol petty cannibalism but he pulls it off because of his close observation of working class life and his allegiance to the tropes of folk horror.

Finally, Emma Glass' fantasy of grief over the death of a child that leads to the willing immersion of a mother in the ancient earth works because the fantasy is embedded in absolute fidelity to the powerful emotions involved. It is quietly devastating as it turns from realism into folk tale.

These three stories make an otherwise very uneven collection well worth owning. It is certainly not that there is anything truly bad in it (though one or two come close) but that the 'working class' writers were perhaps not pushed hard enough to meet the brief by the editorial team.

As to its working class authenticity, I find it hard to judge - the idea of the working class has transformed from the idea of a class defined by its relationship to the means of production to something more amorphous as those left behind by neo-liberal economics.

The purpose of the book (a worthy one) was ostensibly to reverse the patronising assumptions of 'The Wicker Man' and of urban horror writers who positioned rural and other working class communities as containing some threat to 'nice' educated middle class people. Grammar school patrony!

The much-appreciated Nigel Kneale was always a bourgeois at heart who feared the mob whether urban or rural as becomes clear from any sensible reading of 'Quatermass and the Pit' and 'Quatermass IV' (both the epitome of intelligent science fiction-based folk horror).

Similarly most of the neo-pagans who swear by 'The Wicker Man' seem deliberately forgetful that the film was an attack on irrationality, paganism and the suggestibility and weakness of ordinary folk. A literary challenge to all this was long overdue.

Unfortunately, the challenge is not coming from 'authentic' communities but from individuals who are part of or aspirant to becoming part of a particular and increasingly proletarianised artistic and creative community that is threatened with extinction in economically troubled times.

The working class communities here are largely being 'imagined' in no less a manner than they were 'imagined' negatively by their 'bourgeois' predecessors. Nothing wrong with that - Irvine Welsh 'imagines' his amoral thugs in much the same way and creates great literature.

However, the atomisation and fragmentation of the working class and the replacement of positive 'socialist' or 'labour' politics with the politics of identity and 'ressentiment' creates something that is more petit-bourgeois than proletarian.

This creates uneasiness as to authentic appropriation of working class tropes precisely because the appropriation is for a politics as unrecognisable to most traditional working people as would be the top-down social democratic and patronising politics of past denizens of Hampstead.

Still, I wish all the authors well. Most of them have huge potential to refine their art. It is good that the anthology was attempted. If only the rather vicious man-hating (which is anti-working class) aspects could be removed and the final step taken from the identity politics of the liberal Left! show less