Hard as metal

Goregrind, death metal and extreme, thrashing violence form the backdrop of Sara Taylor’s dark debut

Boring Girls

By Sara Taylor

ECW 380 pp; $19

When I was a child, I never wished to be happy, or beloved; my only hope, which I held in every fibre of my being, was that I would not be boring, a quality I perceived as small and mean and limited.

So, I deeply identified with Rachel, the narrator and protagonist of Sara Taylor’s debut novel Bor

ing Girls. Rachel is not boring, not for one moment. Nor is her companion-at-arms and collaborator, Fern. Rachel’s family is loving, but her environment is actively hostile, and she is mercilessly bullied. The aggression and alienation she faces makes her harder, weirder, better able to defend herself. Her journey felt eerily familiar, from her profound loneliness to the ugly joy she experiences when she finally feels a sense of belonging, after encountering the musical subculture that will define her life moving forward. It is so easy to be caught up in her story, her deep friendship with Fern, and her transformation, that by the time she has veered into the darkness, metering out her own aggression and violence, you may be too far gone to find your own way out very easily either.

The music that Rachel becomes obsessed with is notable not just because it is heavy metal, but for the specific sub-genres of heavy metal that she is engaging with. She is not drawn to the grand, sweeping epicness of power metal, the funereal weight of doom or the shivering textures of blackened neofolk. Instead, she discovers an affinity for death and goregrind at it’s most violent and grotesque, finding appeal in the most abject and repulsive lyrics, the most overtly distressing subject matter, the most bloody and brutal incarnations of the genre. It’s the draw of the slasher film, or torture porn, a passion that becomes foreshadowing only in hindsight.

Taylor is the vocalist and songwriter for a metallic goth rock band, The Birthday Massacre (in which context she goes by the moniker Chibi), an experience that deeply enriches the musical culture that Rachel and Fern participate in. The struggles they face forming their band, gaining respect and acknowledgement in the scene, and the disparagement and even violence they face ring uncannily true. It is an incredibly honest, cogent and disturbing portrayal of what it is like to be a woman working in a male-dominated scene and art. You feel for them, you rage along with them, you align yourself with what they do to survive, and so follow them deeper into the darkness.

What makes Rachel so utterly terrifying in the end is how profoundly easy it is to connect with her. She has been wounded so deeply, and in ways that are so familiar, that her gradual transformation into a murderer seems to make so much sense, be so utterly understandable. But Rachel and Fern’s plans, and ultimately their actions, become ever more bloody, and eventually this sense of identification breaks down. But by the time Rachel and Fern fully give themselves over to revenge, we’ve come so far along the way with them that even if we shrink away from plunging in the knife with our own hands, even if we’re watching from a distance, carefully severing some of the bonds that Boring Girls has so skillfully woven between narrator and reader, we can’t help but find ourselves, through sheer proximity, covered in blood.

For all Rachel is and all she becomes, she is certainly never boring. She is consistently devalued and repeatedly hurt. Her world is full of all-too-familiar monsters, and the bullying, misogyny and sexual assault she encounters only prove to be even more real, more horrifying, as the book progresses. The traumas Rachel and Fern suffer are genuinely tragic, and you feel for them, pull for them, right up until the very moment they themsleves become monsters. Boring Girls is a bloody, vulgar, violent book that pulls no punches; it zooms in on the grotesque rather than pulling away. It’s hard not to feel a little uglier, a little louder, a little worse for having read it, for having gone as far down into the pit as Boring Girls demands. It’s a harrowing read, and often an agonizing one. It’s a book that exacts and demands cruelty. One thing that I can say without reservation about it, however, is that it is not, for a single moment, dull.