Julia Armfield: ‘There’s freedom in the monster being the norm’

The 28-year-old says her often macabre stories are about how our bodies contain and betray us – and are ‘not, not horror writing’

Julia Armfield is the sort to describe The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as “beautiful and weird”. This strange choice makes more sense when you read her debut short-story collection, Salt Slow, which could easily have those words on the back cover. “We burned what we could of Simon Phillips in a pit at the end of the garden,” opens her story The Collectibles, in which a trio of female flatmates scavenge bits of men’s bodies while drinking and ordering pizza. It is beautiful, and also weird.

Salt Slow’s stories are both mesmerising and terrifying, in which your sleep can take on a wraith-like form and step out of your body (this story, The Great Awake, won the 2018 White Review short story prize); where a teenage girl transforms into a preying mantis as she goes through puberty; and a girl group that inspires such rage in their female fans that everywhere they tour, men seem to end up dead.

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