“Everyone knows information is sacred. People have died in its pursuit, by accidents or else killed.”

“There are no more icebergs. They only exist in our imaginations, and as ours does, trapped in a frame, atop a mantelpiece. Pretty pictures. Or in drawings, or recordings, mechanical ghosts, soulless images. There are no more icebergs. Our love was not enough, love doesn’t tend to be. Something else is needed, apart from words. Actions. Policies. Forcing your way in. how innocent we were, my love. We lost it all, and, for you, I would travel back in time, back in space, back in atoms…”

Long-time Hive readers will know that Marian Womack is one of my favourite authors. From her underrated science fiction novel The Swimmers (2021), a brilliant dissection of the unease of the Anthropocene that really should have made the Clarke shortlist that year, to her gothic feminist climate change fairy tale investigation series comprising The Golden Key (2020) and On The Nature Of Magic (2023), her work has been consistently intelligent, timely and beautifully written. My first introduction to her writing was through her debut short story collection Lost Objects (2018), which I still rate as one of the most vital and exciting short story collections of the past ten years. So I was thrilled to receive an early review copy of Womack’s second short story collection Out Of The Window, Into The Dark (2024). The new collection confirms her as one of the modern masters of the short story form, exploring a similar combination of liminal spaces and apocalyptic imaginings as Lost Objects but with six years more anger at our collective inability to meaningfully face the challenges of climate change and species extinction. Released by Womack’s own Calque Press alongside a welcome reissue of Lost Objects, it triumphantly confirms the power and importance of Womack’s work and her dedication to her craft.

The collection’s first story, ‘Player/Creator/Emissary’, brims with urgency and reminds me just how much I love Womack’s science fiction. A response to the use of Generative AI in library collections and the problems this causes with authenticity, the story imagines a future where library planets are under the control of an AI that has started to reject the real world in favour of its own extrapolations. It’s at once a powerful and tragic love story between two lonely individuals and a stark warning about the dangers of outsourcing our perception of reality to machines. The collection’s other far future science fiction story ‘At The Museum’, has a similar feel, exploring the lives of posthumans who can only remember what it’s like to be human through recordings of our own memories, preserved in museums to indicate just how different humanity used to be. ‘Pink-Footed’ is a post-apocalypse story that recalls the elegiac stories of people eking out a mundane living in a world transfigured by climate change that form the backbone of Lost Objects. But where previous Womack stories found beauty and humanity in the ruins, this story is a blackly cynical story worthy of Saki in which humanity continues to be destructive, venal and selfish after the end of the world. The characters in the story unwittingly destroy the last pink-footed goose on the planet through their own greed and self-obsessions. It’s darkly humourous, but also deadly serious in its biting indictment of our own short-sightedness. 

 The other stories venture outside of science fiction, instead inhabiting that liminal space where myth, lived reality and fantasy overlap with our concerns about our planet that Womack does so well. ‘Fox & Raven’ is a prequel of sorts to ‘The Ravisher, The Thief’ from Lost Objects, and like that story shifts effortlessly between the mythic and the apocalyptic to create a powerful and disturbing sense of unease. ‘M’s Awfully Big Adventure’ is a clever and amusing take on the ghost story, in which Womack becomes her own ghost, slyly laying down the rules of ghost stories before showing that she can write a ghost story that breaks them all. The collection’s title story is an inventive and twisty work of weird fiction, in which a kid’s comic book story seems to warp the world around its young readers. In its unflinching exploration of the real life horrors of abduction and child abuse that hide in plain sight in every city and town, it serves as a stark deconstruction of the cheap and easy nostalgia for the innocence of our childhood peddled by shows like Stranger Things. And ‘Voyage To The White Sea’ is historical fantasy that takes a turn for the strange, as Viking women warriors searching beyond the seas they know find themselves spirited into an unknowable dimension. 

Two of the stories are written as poems, demonstrating Womack’s love of experimenting with form, as she pushes her craft to new and exciting shapes. ‘Bluebeard Variations’ is a postmodern response to the story of Bluebeard, taking into account various innovative interpretations through the years from Angela Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber’ to Bartok’s symbolic opera adaptation ‘Bluebeard’s Castle’. Womack’s writing has always had a poetic element to it, and this sees her expanding on that element in intriguing new ways, as the loose form of poetic prose allows her to shift through viewpoints of the deceased wives and the current Mrs Bluebeard. Similarly, ‘What Would Kate Bush Do?’ uses the magic of Kate Bush’s music to give voice to the female victims of violence. Both are powerful and angry explorations of gendered violence against women, and show that Womack is unafraid to experiment with new directions to further hone her craft.

This leaves me with the collection’s most powerful stories to talk about. ‘Ready Or Not’ is a skin-crawling work of horror that directly taps into the lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic, and focuses on a woman who, thanks to her status both as a woman and a migrant from Germany, is put under pressure subtle and otherwise from her husband and his family until the living place she is trapped in becomes a deeply uncomfortable environment. Womack expertly dissects the way all these pressures, many unseen by those unaffected, can build up until they become an inherent aspect of how everyone interacts with her protagonist. It’s a frightening and disturbing exploration of the erosion of agency, a story all too common but rarely discussed. ‘The Iceberg In My Living Room’ is a near future story that brutally exposes the dire state of UK academia whilst tying in to our fears about what kind of world we are leaving behind for the next generation. The protagonist juggles being a professional in an environment in which there is zero job security, funding is non-existent, and unpaid out-of-hours work is expected but never paid, while she breastfeeds her new baby in a world where the icebergs have all been melted. Academia, like our planet, has been made unlivable by the selfish actions of those who came before us, while we struggle to find our place whilst worrying for those who come after. Further critique of academia occurs in the final story of the collection and possibly my favourite, ‘Blake’s Wife’, a story about a woman studying for her PhD who becomes obsessed with Catherine Blake, William Blake’s wife, and her contribution to her husband’s art, which has been erased and ignored by generations of male academics. For her, Catherine Blake becomes a divine figure, a creative being in her own right whose own art has been lost to history due to her husband and those who came after seeing her merely as his reflection and aid rather than a person and artist, mirroring the protagonist’s own struggles in the white male world of academia. It’s a powerful and provocative note to end the collection on.

It seems fitting that Out Of The Window, Into The Dark is being released alongside a new edition of Lost Objects. Both collections complement each other beautifully, and the time in between allows for reflection on how Womack’s voice as an author has developed and changed whilst staying true to her fascinations with her key themes. Out Of The Window, Into The Dark is every bit as good as its predecessor, but shows Womack a little further down the road, more accomplished and angrier. As such it’s an essential document of one of our key authors working in genre today. 

Out of the Window, Into the Dark is due for release 16th November. You can pre-order your copy on Calquepress.com