A few days after I finished the Black Flame novel by Gretchen Felker-Martin, I was trying to describe it to a coworker. I was not doing a good job. I said it was horror and you could see it at a surface level or in a deeper manner. We follow a woman, who is a seriously closeted lesbian, who restores old film. She is used as the “official Jew” (she is called the “mailroom Jew” when sent to meet a reporter who is deliberately hurtful, hateful and uses her own “status” of being Jewish to her advantage) by her boss. The film they are working on (by a gay, Jewish director) was found 40 years after the war and in the attic of a Nazi soldier. The academics who hand the job over both reluctantly and gossipy talk about it. We later learn the man who had it, had supposedly tried to eat it and had a seriously bloody end.
That’s just the beginning of things. We follow Ellen as she tries to justify still working at the restoration place (a job her father got her as a favor from a friend, and who have her on this project as she is Jewish and it looks good as they are trying to make up for a recent scandal of having restored a film with Klan ties). We follow her as she tries to “play straight” for her hateful family, as she tries to help a homeless woman, as she deals with harassment at work, and trying to see if she is going mad. Or is the film coming to life? Stalking her? Wanting her blood? Or as Ellen puts it later about something else, a pound of flesh. But of course that cliche is used as flesh is important to things.
If you like semi pornographic horror, this might be for you. There are too many triggers to name as there is violence, blood, body horror, rape, misogyny, racism, language, torture, sexual kinks, sexual torture, homophobia, suicide …. And there is still more! It is not showing you the horrors of war (as I was thinking it would at first, thinking the film was going to be a propaganda film) but really the horror of people and the horrible things they do to themselves. The title of this review comes from a line in the book that probably is one of the more disturbing images out of A LOT of disturbing images.
The setting is around 1985 but in some ways it feels like it could be set anytime. As I was reading I felt you could interpret this as “on the surface” with Ellen being mad and imagining the horrors but also actually creating them herself (her coworker did not claw his eyes out and jump out the window, he had help) or as the film is possessed and it makes Ellen possessed. The ending is both what I expected and a bit surprising, so there was that twist making a mostly predictable course of action little less so. I don’t think I will read more Felker-Martin as I wonder what is wrong with this person???????????????