Wake, Siren lies about being a feminist retelling

What I expected was deconstruction. What I got was trauma porn and revenge fantasy.

Despite a few glimmering gems scattered in this collection, Maclaughlin leaned into the violence more often than she unpacked it. Anything dark, disgusting, or sexual was exaggerated and lingered over. When it wasn’t being gross, the prose was cumbersome and overdone. And I LIKE purple prose most of the time. The back cover didn’t even make it clear if this was a novel where the myths were stitched into one story or if this was a series of short stories. That should have clued me into the poor writing I was heading into but, alas, I gave the book a chance.

Of the 35 short stories I only need one hand to count the ones I liked.

On Violence

This innocuous-looking little book was dripping with violence. Greek and Roman myths are packed with violence against women, but Maclaughlin was reveling in it. Had I picked up a ‘dark’ romance, I would not have been upset like this. Many books have explicit violence: horror, murder mystery, grimdark, etc. But those books aren’t pretending to be something noble or they might even use the violent themes better. This was supposed to be a feminist retelling.

Depicting violence against women can be a useful way to build empathy. Or cathartic for some readers. Instead, I felt a building sense of rage mixed with boredom. I am not opposed to violence in my stories, I’m not opposed to depicting rape in a story. I don’t think including misogyny in a story MAKES it misogynist. But framing and word choice matter a lot. Although, I admit they are subjective. In Wake, Siren, I felt like Maclaughlin cranked up the violence whenever she could, with no point or purpose, despite the stated feminist goals.

Also, if you decide to read this, I beg you to look up the content warnings/trigger warnings for this book. Even if you know the myths already. There is graphic and explicitly described: rape, incest, pedophilia, murder, cannibalism, domestic abuse/intimate partner violence, and emotional abuse. The Storygraph page for Wake Siren might have others.

I am not usually someone who needs trigger warnings for myself, but there were several points that I had to put this book down for days or weeks, upset and angry with it. It took me two months to read this book.

If I weren’t so stubborn I would have DNFed this f’er.

My discomfort while reading Wake, Siren was not the kind that helps you unpack your biases and examine yourself critically. We lingered on the thoughts of a girl pursuing incest with her father, of a woman murdering her son and feeding him to his father. The Myrrha story blames the CHILD for incestuous rape, I was furious and felt gross reading it. Others would just throw in random lines about “animal dicks” (page 297), and that story I had been enjoying!

Even in the final story, which as far as I can tell is not based on a myth, Maclaughlin decided to talk about cannibalism. This one is a metaphor about how stories get passed on through generations, changed and reworked, never dying. At first, the metaphor is just trees growing and being made into tables or people’s bodies breaking down and feeding plants. But she couldn’t just can’t leave it at that.

The narrator talked with their family and lover over dinner about death and how nothing truly dies. But then they say:

“When you die I would like to eat a bite of you. A small medallion of flesh from your flank or your thigh, cooked over flame. A bite of your to live inside me, to have you move through my body, and then to release you from me. But not all the way, because some particles of you would get absorbed in my blood, and you would swim inside me and thud through me as my heart thuds. I want you to live on in me.”

This idea gets repeated a few times in the piece. The narrator also asks the family and lover to eat a piece of them. It was weird, gross, and unnecessary. Which honestly sums up much of the violence in this book.

On Art

I like “purple” prose sometimes. As an artist at heart, I am willing to work through tricky sentences if they are pretty or paint a vivid picture. I believe that was Maclaughlin’s goal, but ultimately I found the prose painful. The sentences were confusing, uneven, and often overdone.

A few stories in, I flipped to the back and read the author’s note. This book was born from a writing exercise and it shows. McLaughlin felt compelled to try to find the voice of each of the women in the Metamorphoses, or at least most of them, and tell their story in “their own voice”. Sometimes she found an interesting and unique voice, even through her tendency for overwrought prose. But many of these women’s voices blended together. This piece is also fairly obviously experimental. Some parts of it work and some fall flat.

MacLaughlin also really tried to write extensive similies and metaphors. The best, but far from only, example of this is near the start of Tiresias’ story. Triesias is blind, and for a time had been turned into a woman, and then back to a man. The excerpt below happens when Triesias explains what blindness feels like:

Two: blindness now and then allows me to feel like a traveler in a foreign country, the way walking down a street in a city where you don’t speak the alnguage allows you to dissolve. You become a simmer of senses. You forget your self. You forget what you understand yourself to be and what other people understand you to be. A feeling of extraordinary freedom, to be lifted temporarily from the encumbrance of self conciousness! You are gone and there is only the dark rich sent of coffee from the cafe, the flap of a light blue curtain blown from a window left open on the fourth floor, the sweet singe of exhaust from scooters, syllables tumbling from mouths like pure music—instrumental, the stray dog by the curb covered in sores snapping weakly at flies, the nervous flutter of clucking from chickens in pens, the man with the cart on the corner with his warm chestnuts which smell like biscuts with butter and honey, the dark eyebrows on that woman, the small boy holding a tattered stuffed animal pig, the gold-and-blue tile on the wall, like colors you’ve never seen before, somehow deeper and richer than the ones you you know from home, the barges sliding down the river leaving slicks of oil in their wake, the clatter, blang, and pulse of traffic, something warm from the oven, golden loaves, that nourishing yeasty smell, and a woman emerging from the bakery in a stylish red coat with bread in her bag, two teenagers with backpacks shoving each other and by accident bumping a man with fancy shoes who looks startled then smiles, a child screaming at his brother and kicking the air. [whew, do you even remember what this was all about? Because I sure didn’t] You’re gone except for what washes over you, and you are wholly there and not there at all. No one can see you! You don’t exist in this place! It’s uncomfortable in some ways—the experience of your own absence—and it’s exhilarating because you are unburdened of the weight of people’s wondering about you and you wondering about yourself.

Wake, Siren pg. 47-48

All of that stuff about a street took up almost an entire page and didn’t have any paragraph breaks. By the end, I had to back up to remember what we’d been talking about. As I was typing it up, I realized that the analogy is bizarre. First, it is mostly listing sights, but it’s supposed to be about blindness. Second, I didn’t leave the passage with any real understanding of what “And I am not left with any understanding of what Maclaughlin means by “losing your sense of yourself” was supposed to mean in this context. Also, why would you be invisible to people while traveling? Put simply, the imagery here fell flat. It’s supposed to be poetic and it almost worked on me at first, but then got so unwieldy I got lost as a reader.

Final thoughts

I will say, I am a little glad I pushed through because the final myth was the best one. Eurydice. For this myth, Maclaughlin reimagined Eurydice as a young, talented musician in a more modern setting and described her abusive relationships, first with her father and then with several boyfriends. That story, finally, had calm enough prose that Maclaughlin’s talent for imagery could show through. The majority of the passages I enjoyed were imagery.

The story of Medusa, the one I most wanted to read was good, but far too short.

Overall, what I got out of this book was something to dissect. I want to write more (hence this blog) so now I have something to dissect and try to understand the myriad ways it didn’t work for me and to pick out the nuggets that did work. Unequivocally, this did not work as any sort of feminist retelling. If you want to read Roman myth retellings for fun I do not recommend it. I did not have fun or feel like I gleaned any great insight into the violence women experience. There were flashes of it in there, Maclaughlin tried. But I don’t think enough of it came through to counterbalance the trauma porn and bizarre gross twists.

Maybe that final story that compared retellings to cannibalism is true if you do it the way it was done in Wake, Siren. I was very happy to move on to books I actually like after reading this. Books like Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom; Shadow and Bone; and Tress of the Emerald Sea.