Dark, unsettling and enigmatic

“We had yet to see how it unfurled inside our own species.
How it impacted the two-legged and carnal. A glimmer of puce in woman’s eye, a child’s back with its fuzz of copper fur. Biological ripples that spoke to an interior horror”

Redder days is set in a post-apocalyptic, dystopian world where men, animals, vegetation and all living organisms seems to be plagued by the Red, a disease that among other things transfers some animal qualities to the individual catching it. Two twins, Anna and Adam, live alone in an isolated dwelling after the community, including their mother, abandoned them. The only one remaining with them is Koan, the once charismatic guru/leader who exercised control over the community with his insights and prophecies. These include the malignancy of the Red, the need to abate whatever is touched by it, including infants, the coming of a redemptive Storm and the rituals of purifications. He exercises forms of control over women and births. But is all he says true? The return of one of the members will make us see things in a different light.

This is an immersive, unsettling and enigmatic read. The reader is catapulted into this world and must hunt for clues and draw his own (incomplete) conclusions. The reading experience is a disorienting one as we are not given to understand what happened and which versions of reality are reliable, having been given only partial points of view. We are immersed in a world where nature is ominous and strangely alive and humans start displaying animal qualities, where woods seem alive entities engulfing humans, alliances with animals seem possible and the ominous appearance of sea creatures is charged with symbolic qualities.

Many are the themes that inhabit this post-apocalyptic scenario: one is the blind faith expressed by the community, desperate search for beliefs in times of uncertainty and the manipulative power that exploits them. Partly a novel about ecological disruption, Redder Days also thematises the reaction of horror in front of the breakdown this disease represents (e.g. breakdown of meaning and of the order of the world as we know it, between human and animal, skin and flesh recalling the notion of abject). The novel also thematises the threat posed by the body and in particular the female body: it features a magmatic web of discourses around the “two-legged and carnal”, the female body with its fluids, excretions and birth, the association of sexuality, pleasure, birth and plague and the attempt to suppress and control it all. We are in a dystopian world in which, in one of the fugitives’ words (Tabatha), being born into the world and living becomes an experience of estrangement, of "severing parts” and suppressing the scream inside -- the only thing that seems to make sense is to escape. A related theme is aptly abandonment and guilt, atonement and redemption. Human affairs are also intertwined with those of a the planet finding a “way to purge”. All this accounts for a complex, mesmerizing experience (the notions of severance, collapsing boundaries and purge all invite a confrontation with Kristeva’s notion of the abject, and a reading in this light is useful).

The reader, immersed in this world, witnesses the collapse and breakdown of boundaries and meanings and may feel lost, searching for answers. While this probably is a desired effect, at times it can also detract from the reading experience. What makes this novel fantastic is Rainsford’s immensely evocative visionary writing, the powerful world building, the eerily disturbing imagery and the female subtext. Certainly a unique accomplishment.

I am grateful to the publisher for an ARC of this book via NetGalley