Review: Everything That's Underneath by Kristi DeMeester

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in return for an honest review.

‘In Kristi DeMeester’s transformative dark fantasy collection, Everything That’s Underneath, the author explores the places most people avoid.

‘A hole in an abandoned lot, an illness twisting your loved one into someone you don’t recognise, lust that pushes you further and further until no one can hear your cry for help. In these 18 stories, the characters cannot escape the evil that is haunting them. They must make a choice: accept it and become part of what terrifies them the most or allow it to consume them and live in fear forever.

‘Crawl across the earth and dig in the dirt. Feel it. Tearing at your nails, gritty between your teeth, filling your nostrils. Consume it until it has consumed you. For there you will find the voices that have called from the shadows, the ones that promise to cherish you only to rip your body to shreds.’

Everything That’s Underneath, by Kristi DeMeester, comprises 18 short stories featuring a range of horrors, drawn together by a number of common threads.

Reading through my notes on the stories in this collection, two words kept cropping up: “imaginative” and “compelling”. DeMeester continually presents you with different, surprising scenarios, and it was interesting to see where she took them.

There were instances where I wasn’t sure if I’d interpreted the ending correctly, or generally wondered what on Earth I’d just read, but I suspect that may have been the author’s intent.

A theme that runs through quite a few of the stories is that of unusual parent-child relationships, particularly between mothers and daughters and often at adolescence, when girls really start to stake out their identities as individuals and – so the trope goes – have a heightened sensitivity to the supernatural.

To name a few examples, a teenage girl is seduced into witchcraft (The Tying of Tongues); a mother discovers the entity she worships only wants her daughter as sacrifice, and not the pair of them as she always planned (The Marking); and a young adult is required to take up the mantle of healer and diviner when her mother dies, but her magic comes in a darker shade than that of her predecessor (The Lightning Bird).

Siblings are an adjacent standout theme. In Birthright, two teenage sisters share dreams of a “Dark Lady” which spill over into waking life and relate to the late mother they barely remember; in All That Is Refracted, Broken, a small boy who wasn’t supposed to survive can only look at his older sister using a mirror; and in December Skin, a young man attempts to save his sister, who’s taken to unconsciously eating living beings at night, from herself.

A few other stories in this collection similarly make use of dreams or dreamlike imagery, and/or involve characters consuming gross things.

As the summaries above suggest, loss is another major theme, whether characters are trying to come to terms with, reverse, or prevent it. I was especially moved by the title story, where a former dancer with MS carves an intricate door that restores his health, and To Sleep in the Dust of the Earth, where a woman mourning her four-year-old son turns to a strange old schoolfriend with a curious gift for retrieving lost things. I found the latter particularly haunting and sad.

Everything That’s Underneath is an imaginative and compelling short story collection that cuts deep.