Viruses, sex dolls and horror endings. Courtney Bush reviews Stacy Skolnik’s debut novel The Ginny Suite.
While The Ginny Suite (2024), a short horror novel about a worldwide virus that makes straight women submissive and aphasiac, was making its rounds, an editor at FSG complained of the manuscript’s ‘airy nihilism [they] found difficult to stomach’. The writer Stacy Skolnik took it as a compliment. I took it as a sign that I needed to read it, as I have grown weary of the hopeful sparkle that’s been glazed over the glut of sentient sex dolls in recent popular media. Don’t try to tell me Barbie isn’t a sex doll. And don’t initiate a conversation with me about Bella Baxter unless you have a week to spare.
When Dr. Frankenstein built his (male) monster, he was trying to build a friend. When a female monster, or robot, is built, you can bet someone is trying to fuck it. And the women in The Ginny Suite, whether they are uninfected, infected with the autonomy-dissolving virus, or one the gynoid sex dolls that also populate the only slightly exaggerated dystopic world we actually live in, are fucked.
The unnamed narrator is one of the uninfected, at least at the outset of the novel. Her voice is a strange combination of the romantic and the noir, alternating, sometimes within the same paragraph, between hardboiled nihilism, placing us in ‘the only watering hole within biking distance that they could count on to never ID, where the bar was sticky, the mice friendly, and the beer flat but two dollars a pint—while she bent over the pool table to win five dollars and the stares of old men with food in their beards’, and a flowery mournfulness, where the narrator, ‘rides against the wind toward her house and into the future’, which shouldn’t logically fit together. To be mournful, one has to care about something. I like the disjunction.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is also a formal precursor The Ginny Suite. Just as a reader of the 1818 novel has to parse together the story of both the doctor and the monster through their epistles, a reader of The Ginny Suite gathers information by sifting through chapters of widely varying forms and sources. The main thread, the protagonist’s inner monologue, is cut and complicated by poems, advertisements, and internet articles about Sunnyvale syndrome, in which we find women trying and failing to explain their debilitating condition without the help of their husbands. And the afflicted all have husbands, a fact that grows more sinister and relevant as the novel builds. We also read medical waivers and disclaimers about a surgical procedure the protagonist has scheduled to remove a birthmark. All of the women afflicted with the virus have had surgery within a year before their symptoms close in. Uh-oh, unnamed protagonist.
And then we have Ginny, the other, most mysterious female subject of the novel. In three passages, which are out of chronological order, we read about Ginny Jensen, a woman who may be afflicted with Sunnyvale syndrome, but whose neighbours thought, for a while, was just one of the PerfectCompanion sex/wife robots which also exist in the novel’s world. We hear of her first in a news article about a gynoid/afflicted woman (who can be sure?) who loses her shit and becomes violent. Next, we have Ginny’s journals as she approaches her breakdown, losing language as she tries to grasp at what her existence is becoming as a prisoner of the virus or her husband (who can be sure?). I find Ginny’s journal to be the most interesting passage in the novel, and the section which most makes me grateful that Skolnik, at the end of the day, is a poet. These journals have a music, subtle rhyme and rhythm.
TUE 6-7
Gregory tells me my name. Gave me my name, a word typed often and many. Took my hand and called me “wife,” “pet,” “doll,” “dear.” All was well in the city. I was familiar with the grid.”
TUE 8-7
Play, girl, play! Ha, ha. The songs I hate on shuffle. The rules of my data loosening. I was made not sure to think, but sure enough. I am very sweet and kind. And Gregory uses my mouth to the beat of the song. I’m not interested, though do recall once having been. “Oh, Ginny,” he says, but everything I hear is the wrong way.
The last time we hear from Ginny, she’s the narrator’s estranged friend Virginia, weakly trying to communicate over speakerphone, just having moved to the suburbs with her husband. We know what’s to come for Ginny, even though the narrator doesn’t, because we already read about it.
And the further you read, the more you feel the virus close in around our narrator, who also understands that it’s coming for her. Her musings throughout the novel, about her troubled memories and relationships with her mother and father, her childhood, her sexual and physical development, her marriage, her dating life (or, her cheating life), and the embarrassing, dirty business of the New York literary scene (which feels painfully well cast) begin to take on the sheen of a last trip around one’s own life, a catalog of what was hers, meager as it might be, before she’s taken by the virus, whether the actual variant printed in the newspapers, or the one that’s been taking her since before the virus existed, the constant stream of information about how to be a woman in a world that hates women.
Since reading The Ginny Suite, I’ve thought a lot about how Skolnik subverts the horror ending, why I’m left with such a strange feeling. Though there is a woman left standing at the end of the book, looking at herself in the mirror, a survivor, but not a final girl. For there to be a final girl, the girl at the end, smeared with blood and sweat, heart pounding from surviving the horror, has to have something worth surviving for. Hope of some kind. What’s scary in Skolnik’s horror novel, and what might be hard to stomach, is that there is none.
The Ginny Suite is out now and available to purchase from Montez Press.
~
Text: Courtney Bush
Image by Maria Sledmere
Published: 23/7/24
Commentaires