Some of the stories assume extra clarity when examined in reverse, as though they’re negatives in photography – think of all the fiction, films and TV series with a high female body count. Nowhere more so than in Stop your women’s ears with wax, which goes on the road with a girl band of elusive, birdlike creatures that inspire murder in their ardent female fans. Women have animal as well as human natures here they can be difficult and vengeful and across the collection the male body count is high. Linked to sexual awakening, the metamorphoses in Mantis and Formerly Feral are accompanied by predatory instincts. She is similarly restrained as she describes a young woman becoming an insect, another becoming a wolf. Again, Armfield hits on the perfect metaphor and the story’s absurdity is beautifully underplayed. The Great Awake – a fresh take on alienation and always-on culture, which won the White Review Short Story Prize in 2018 – charts the descent of a city into insomnia when people’s “Sleeps,” silent shadow figures, separate from them. Tapping into the darkness of the contemporary world, she brings to mind other young British writers like Sophie Mackintosh but her fantasies have a precision and surreality of their own. 'Sometimes at night he takes his apple knife to the delicate membrane between her toes, but they don't talk about that either' The narrator has not made peace with her sexuality and changes the subject whenever uncomfortable feelings arise, but the dead woman – a brilliant personification of shame – is unperturbed by the state of her body and the narrative tone is also matter-of-fact, full of deadpan wit. The decomposing girlfriend in Cassandra After is one of the collection’s most visceral symbols.

Bodies are sites of transformation they can metamorphose, turn to stone or rise from the dead with tendons exposed and skin coming away from the bone. Grounded in the everyday, the stories borrow from myth and Gothic literature, their familiarity upended by elements of the uncanny and macabre. Armfield’s fictions are set on these thinner surfaces, unstable places where boundaries – between humans and animals, wakefulness and sleep, land and sea – are prone to weaken or disappear. It’s a moment of clarity, of self-acceptance, but it’s telling for other reasons too. these places are where the strange, true things escape.” “The surface of the world is thinner in certain places,” she says, “. Towards the end of one story in Julia Armfield’s debut collection, a woman begins to make sense of her dead girlfriend’s return.

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