Today we take a leap forward into much more current writing. Hesper Leveret’s short story ‘Not a Basking Shark’ was published by Fireside in 2022 and you can read it here. If you’re wondering why these lists often jump from the early 20th to the early 21st century with little in between, it’s because both copyright and access become more of an issue in the mid-20th century. I have to admit to loving the end of the list though. It’s an opportunity to share some of my favourite new stories and to explore some authors who are writing now and producing new work to look forward to! When I read this story it went straight on the list for #AScareADay. I’m not normally particularly interested in mermaids but I absolutely loved the way they are imagined here!
The story focuses on Sally (Dr. Saleema Malik), a marine biologist working on a project in Cornwall, following up leads on ‘uncorroborated sightings of unusual sea creatures’ (which, I have to say, sounds a lot more intriguing than the baby turtle project everyone else is after!) She’s expecting a misidentified basking shark but find something significantly more disturbing (and alluring). She’s drawn down to the beach by a sighting of something she can’t explain and we’re introduced to a mermaid who is nothing like the mermaids of legend. Mermaids come in all forms, it seems. There are many types and the full list of types seems to include mermaid versions of pretty much everything that lives in the sea. The first mermaid we meet, seemingly in distress, is an abyssal mermaid that reminds her of nothing so much as an ogrefish and/or an anglerfish. Like the anglerfish, she has some bioluminescence going on but the biggest similarity perhaps is the use of bait to draw in prey. In this case though, she’s the bait. Sally goes down to the beach because she seems to be in distress but as soon as Sally’s back is turned she’s swimming happy and seemingly right as rain.
What stands about this tale of mermaids is how invested it is in the sea and sealife. I’m used to mermaids being associated with the ‘dangers of the sea’ in vague quasi-heroic or romantic terms. These mermaids are rooted in the realities of sealife (I love the descriptions of the different mermaids) and the impact of climate change on ocean temperatures and conditions. It’s hard to think of the eco-Gothic in reading this with the mermaids representing the retributive threat of a ‘natural world’ which has been exploited and poisoned. What struck me the most the first time of reading (and judging from everyone’s posts on social media about the challenge, I’m not alone!) was the promise of a future that humanity has brought on itself. The mermaids are not represented as either powerless or victimised. Instead they, and the sea they represent, are pictured as wronged, patient and expectant. It isn’t the promise of vengeance, so much as a prophecy
Lowenna and Mado both laugh at me, and Mado speaks. “We’ll do just fine. There might be few enough of us left, but as the waters rise, so will we. We will swim through the streets of London. We will grow forests of kelp on your rolling hills. We will feast on the remnants of humanity and make coral reefs of your bones.”
On both the global and the personal level, the mermaids seem to represent the promise of (self) annihilation and replacement. Sally is almost caught by the mermaids. They attract her with siren voices and she only truly wakes up to her danger just in time. She has already noted it though, the fact that the tide will be coming in and she’ll be caught in it soon if she’s not careful. There’s a sort of fatalism to her conversation with the seal-life mermaid who speaks to her, an unspoken willingness to take that risk, that comes in part from the lure of the voice and in part from herself. The story has introduced her as dealing with lost love and the songs of the mermaids calls to her and also to that loss. She survives and breaks free from the voices by remembering the lover who’s left her, by imagining her smile and her cups of tea and thinking that she wants to see them again. I don’t want to give the impression that she has a sort of ‘I will live on scraps, the barest smile of my beloved will sustain me’ type realisation, rather she realises that Esther’s laugh and happiness and cups of tea are real and good and represent a world worth loving, living in and fighting for. I like the way the personal and the global dove tail and diverge in this story. I’m not sure whether the something hopeful ending to her own story offers any hope for the larger problem faced. On the personal level, her story doesn’t offer a future so much as a continuation of the present. She doesn’t imagine loving again or new futures, she thinks about what is still dear to her amid the losses she’s already faced. Is that what the story offers us on the global scale? Is there any way to escape the mermaid’s promise/prophecy/threat? Or are we left with the way things have already changed and the realisation that what we still have is worth fighting for? I’m not sure! Tell me what you think.
Romancing the Gothic 