Yrsa Sigurdardottir: I Remember You

Yrsa Sigurdardottir is primarily known for her crime novels featuring Thora Gudmunsdottir, lawyer and mother who keeps being drawn into strange and sometimes flatly eerie cases. Given the sometimes spectral atmosphere of her detective novels, which often link past wrongs with present crimes, it’s not all that surprising that Sigurdardottir would branch out into horror.

I Remember You is a ghost story, told in two parts. In one if the threads, three woefully underexperienced and poorly equipped city folk - married couple Garðar and Katrin, and their recently widowed friend Lif - buy an abandoned house in Hesteyri, a summer fishing community on a remote peninsula, and make a DIY project out of renovating it, hoping to make a living by operating it as a guesthouse. It’s winter, they are alone, and the nearest human is two hours away by boat - if they can climb the steep hill to get mobile reception to make a call, and if the water is calm. But as the days go by, they begin to feel that they are not, in fact, alone. Glimpses of someone - someone with the appearance of child, hooded, who never looks up - where no one ought to be, things going missing, strange sounds in the night. And two broken off crosses, memorials to a woman and child who died in the same year - a mother drowned trying to save her son - taken from the local cemetery and placed near their house.

In the other thread, set in the town of Ísaforþur - the closest year-round community to Hestryri - police office Dagny, confronted with a disturbing case of vandalism in the local school, asks physician and psychiatrist Freyr, her neighbour and maybe boyfriend, for his professional opinion. Unpleasant as it is to have such a thing happen in a small community, the mystery deepens when one of Freyr’s patients, an old man dying on cancer who taught in the same schoolhouse sixty years ago, tells him about a similar act of vandalism that took place then - an act so similar that the same words had been scrawled in the walls. This is followed by another disquieting event, the suicide of a woman from a nearby village, who hung herself in a church - a church which we later learn was moved from Hesteyri to its new home in Súðavík in 1960. Exploration of the two cases, and the earlier act of vandalism, reveal connections between the dead woman, the first violation of the school, several other residents of the area who have died under strange circumstances in recent years, and the unsolved disappearance of a young boy named Bernodis in the community sixty years ago. Over these things hangs the shadow of Freyr’s missing son, Benni, who disappeared three years earlier while playing hide and seek with some friends, and is presumed to be dead - and whose name appears in the suicide note of the dead woman.

As the two narrative threads develop, the sense that all of these things - the strange events on the island, the vandalism, the deaths of several old classmates and, strangest of all, the disappearance of Freyr’s son, are somehow connected to old tragedies, lost children whose ghosts remain, seeking some kind of closure. Connections build slowly, linking Freyr and his son to the group stranded in Hestreyi through a chain of coincidence, linking the lost child Bernodis to the house that Garðar, Katrin and Lif bought in Hestreyi.

As with so many of the best ghost stories, the roots of the haunting and the horror lie in the cruelty of humans, in lies and deceits and torments that result in unintended consequences that haunt those responsible until the truth is finally uncovered. Yet this is more than just a morality tale, it’s a look into the darknesses of the human soul, and a reminder that horror breeds horror.

Lori Selke: The XY Conspiracy

Jyn works as a stripper, and she’s very good at her job - albeit rather cynical about the nature of the business and the majority of the customers she encounters. Her real passion, however, is hunting UFOs - and finding evidence to support her theory that not only do aliens exist, and have an interest in Earth, they are actually involved in a vast biological experiment centered on mammalian reproduction. As Jyn explains it: “According to scientists, no more than 300 million years ago, one of the chromosomes in the identical X pair mutated into a male-determining gene. If this rogue chromosome was present, then the organism that carried it would be male, no matter what. Over time, that rogue chromosome altered even more, lost much of its genetic material, and became truncated. That’s where we are now. In theory, this process could go even further, and the Y chromosome could disappear entirely. In fact, this has already happened in other species. But not in humans. Or more generally, primates. Over the past 30 to 50 million years, there has been a sustained pattern of gene migration onto the Y chromosome among primates, and only primates. That’s backwards. Left to themselves, genes should migrate away from the vestigial Y chromosome.”

This is the basic conceit of Lori Selke’s The XY Conspiracy, a short novel published as part of Aqueduct Press’ feminist-focused Conversation Pieces series.

When Jyn notices that she’s being observed by someone with a strong resemblance to the Men In Black familiar to every UFO enthusiast, she decides it’s time to make herself hard to find. Packing her research notes and her working clothes into her car, she hits the road, travelling from the location of one important UFO sighting to another, pausing along the way to earn money at strip clubs from Seattle to Montana, looking fir clues to support her theory. Meanwhile, her friend Dina is researching online, sending her articles about discoveries in the area of reproduction, sex and gender.

It’s an interesting, even provocative, juxtaposition, a narrative that chronicles the environment of a professional sex worker, someone whose livelihood is based in displaying the obvious biological distinctions between sexes, and at the same time looks at scientific evidence of the fragility and perhaps even the eventual disappearance of the chromosomal basis for sexual differentiation in mammals - including man. The protagonist’s often clinical, almost anthropological commentary on the details of a stripper’s life, the clubs, the culture, the men, and the broader attitudes toward strippers and sex workers as portrayed in the media, make a strong counterpoint to her thesis that the Y chromosome, the very basis of the sexually differentiated behaviour that shapes her working environment' is alien.

The novel is open-ended. We don’t know, not for sure, whether Jyn is right or not. But the possibilities are there, waiting for a continued conversation.