Humans are not meant to live in total isolation. Many of us had just a small taste of this during the shutdowns in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. But Sunny Moraine takes social distancing to the extreme in their apocalyptic horror novella Your Shadow Half Remains, which came out last month.
Riley lives alone in the lakeside cabin that still bears the bloodstain from her grandparents’ gruesome deaths. Of course she lives alone—a strange condition has been ravaging the world for the past few years that causes people to descend into violent madness if they look each other in the eyes. Anyone who survived that initial period of chaos when no one knew what was happening and murders/suicides spread like a virus now avoids eye contact at all costs. And the only way to really be sure you won’t ever accidentally glimpse someone’s face is to just avoid other people entirely. Society has continued on somehow, with automated agriculture and online grocery shopping, but the passage of time loses all meaning as Riley spends her days wandering aimlessly through the forested paths outside her empty home. Then a new neighbor arrives. Ellis is recklessly friendly, inviting Riley inside his home and encouraging her to spend far too much time in close proximity with him, but she can’t resist. Why is he so eager for the kind of human contact that could get them both killed? Can Riley really trust him? Can she even trust herself?
The initial premise of this story reminded me a lot of the 2014 novel Bird Box by Josh Malerman (later made into a film starring Sandra Bullock), but Moraine goes in a very different direction. First, the danger is internal rather than external, so you cannot even hole up with your loved ones to stay safe. The only surefire method for avoiding infection is absolute isolation, but that brings with it dangers of a different sort of madness. Rather than having to wear a blindfold when outside, Riley wears special glasses called “blinders” when spending time indoors with Ellis, and she is constantly evaluating his mental state and her own to check for nascent signs of violence and madness. But almost as frightening as this unexplainable mental contagion is the way that capitalism and consumerism has continued on, even while all of the social and emotional elements that make life worth living have nearly disappeared. Riley cannot maintain loving relationships with friends or family, but she can Doom Scroll through social media and buy things online, presumably endangering some poor worker who must risk their life daily to keep some small corner of society running like normal. Yet another major source of this book’s horror is the uncertainty. Cut off from the rest of the world, especially after she destroys her phone in a fit of nihilistic despair, Riley has no way of knowing if the disease is evolving or if the best practices for avoiding infection have changed. Even when she was in contact with the outside world, no one really understood what was going on. If all that sounds familiar, yes, a significant portion of this novel is pointed commentary on the Covid-19 pandemic, which is almost unavoidable in any sort of apocalyptic horror story nowadays.
In my most recent blog post, a review of Tlotlo Tsamaase’s Womb City, I discussed how not being able to trust your own mind is one of the scariest tropes of horror. But Riley lives so constantly in this state of fear that she ultimately accepts it as a “new normal”:
She used to live in terror of insanity, because no longer being able to trust your own perception struck her as one of the worst fates imaginable. But then it started happening all of the time to everyone, and perversely, that removed its fangs rather than lengthening and sharpening them. You can’t ever trust yourself anyway.
But even though Riley accepts this, it’s still alarming to discover evidence of actions she doesn’t remember committing and flashes of memory that don’t jive with her own understanding of events. The question is, once you acknowledge that you can trust neither others nor yourself, how do you move forward?
If you’re looking for some good existential horror and aren’t yet sick of pandemic books, definitely check out Your Shadow Half Remains. You can find it on shelves now at your favorite local retailer, or buy it online and support The Gothic Library in the process using this Bookshop.org affiliate link. Once you’ve read it, let me know your thoughts in the comments!
Interesting scenario, though I can’t help feeling that most people would adapt to avoiding eye contact as their heads are buried in to their phone screens, most of the time.