Review: Smell Complaint: short story by Mara Reboi
I received a free copy of this book from the author in return for an honest review.
‘A peaceful building with cozy apartments, and neighbors who keep to themselves; it seemed like a perfect place for Lena to run away to after her life in Finland met a dark end. This beginning grants her a new home, a new remote job… and a new, ever escalating problem.
‘First start the tortured screams. Then a stench starts to waft through the vents, crawls past the floorboards, and clings to her clothes. Is it just spoiled meat from a broken freezer or is her next-door neighbour perhaps rotting away?
‘The police can’t help before there are corpses – but can Lena find the source just with sheer determination, a bucketful of cleaning supplies, and deep empathy she didn’t know she could feel towards a sickly stranger?’
Long time readers of my blog may know I enjoy a good short story: I really appreciate the discipline involved in paring details back to the need-to-know, and touching on backstories and ideas without getting bogged down in them, all while entertaining the reader. Smell Complaint, by Mara Reboi, is a good example of this.
At surface level, it’s a satisfying horror yarn. There’s distressing noises, the putrid smell of the title, the disgusting substance it turns out to come from – and the seeming impossibility of resolving it when the source, Tom, won’t answer his door, and the building manager isn’t interested. You can’t help but want to know how it’s all going to end.
Main character/victim Lena has moved to the States for a fresh start after a difficult and draining phase of life back in her native Finland. Between the sensory horror and the impersonal feeling of her new building, though, her hopes aren’t realised. She even ends up falling back into her old role of needing to care for and worry about another person at her own expense, which is something she must have wanted a break from.
The story touches on wider discomfiting themes: the central nightmare for Lena is that nothing can be done unless something happens that lures Tom out of his apartment, or he literally dies. Tom can’t get medical help because he has no health insurance; Lena owns her flat but has no control over the building it’s part of, and odious smells and matter don’t respect property boundaries.
Chances are, the building manager covers a number of blocks of apartments owned by a corporation, with no personal stake in keeping them habitable, while cuts to public services mean that in the absence of a real emergency, Lena has nowhere to turn to engage help for Tom. Supernatural elements aside, Lena’s desperate situation feels all too plausible under late-stage capitalism.
Smell Complaint is a quick, multi-sensory horror read that’s scary on many levels.