Rolling Stone

In the title story of A Song for Wildcats, two young men, Felix and Alfie, take a boat to go birdwatching at an archipelago just off the coast of Corsica. Having spent the afternoon together in a lush floral landscape, the near strangers settle onto the rocky shore to share a spliff and embark on a ponderous discussion about the nature of love.

With his legs drawn up and his elbows propped on his knees, Felix contemplates. “I think love is like kindness,” he says, “like how you can carry out an act that embodies kindness without it genuinely coming from a place of empathy and altruism. Maybe it’s, you know, ego using an act of kindness as a vehicle to satisfy itself.” Alfie, the narrator, responds, “I had love back at school.” Then he describes it as feeling “like someone knew where all the bruises were and how hard to press.”

This heartbreaking combination of the visceral and the emotional is the hallmark of Caitlin Galway’s first collection of short fiction. Through five substantial stories, the reader is introduced to varied depictions of love in the face of trauma, the often marred and blood-soaked imagery mirroring the rawness of the book’s painful subject matter.

In the opening story, Felix and Alfie try to navigate their increasingly fraught intellectual and physical connection — and the lingering ramifications of prior abuse and desire — in the shadow of student unrest. “The Islanders” introduces readers to eleven-year-old Jamie, a troubled Irish orphan who is plagued by visions and destructive impulses while struggling to connect with his aunt and new guardian, Lydia. The closing story, “The Lyrebird’s Bell,” offers a common yet no less searing portrayal of two adolescent British girls against the world, their infatuation blossoming despite their families’ differences. “As I faced her, our foreheads touched,” Elizabeth says of Annabelle. “My bed was too small, meant for a child half my age, with delicate white trim like cake fondant and a headboard patterned with black-and-gold bees. To fit we had to overlap our arms, let our skin stick together, tangle our raw-boned legs.”

The author of Bonavere Howl, a novel from 2019, Galway writes with sumptuous, gothic prose — each line expertly crafted, each description a gut punch, each character a powerful mix of world-weary, broken, and defiant. These stories find themselves somewhere between dream and nightmare, their interpersonal dynamics possessing a threatening quality even when they are explicitly loving.

Toward the end of “The Lyrebird’s Bell,” Elizabeth helps tend to Annabelle’s self-inflicted bloody nose. “If I tell my mother she did it when she was drunk, she’ll behave for a while,” Annabelle explains, ominously, while pressing a tea towel to her face. Elizabeth reflects on their relationship, describing it as “perversely private, both a sacred and shameful secret.” Galway brings a visual elegance to the intimacy and physical brutality of the scene. “The bleeding eventually stopped, though Annabelle kept a bud of tissue up one of her nostrils,” Elizabeth recalls. “A bruise formed over her nose and winged beneath her eyes. It looked like a purple watercolour of a bird taking flight.”

The volume is also marked by the author’s effortless ability to traverse time periods and geography. She conjures believable portraits of places and eras, whether it is postwar Australia, the 1968 French student protests, or the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The link between these diverse plots always lies in the strength of the feelings between people that Galway is able to evoke. “The brush of his fingers still clung to my skin,” Alfie says of Felix’s touch, for example. “Clean and cool and eviscerating, like drops of bleach.” Detailed memories and thoughts contribute to this immediacy. “Had she tried to break off those radical pieces of herself like rib bones she could bury out of sight?” Lydia wonders about her sister, Jamie’s mother. “Had the bloodhounds, with their noses for vulnerability, dug up those bones and brought them back to her?”

In these pages, the mundane becomes a spectacular, transcendent event. When Annabelle bites into a plum, the sound of each “toothy squelch” brings up the image of her mother “jarring them in syrup to turn into jam, the alchemy of sweetening the unpalatable.” When Jamie accidentally breaks a jar of shells in front of Lydia, it sounds like “a glassy shriek” and leaves “a wreckage of broken scallop shells and glittering bits of amber glass like scattered fish eggs.”

As haunting and ethereal as it is gritty and raw, Galway’s voice is singular, able to tackle wide-ranging locales, eras, and sensations, while repeatedly pushing readers deep into the discomforts of human behaviour. Alfie’s poignant reflections on the existential pain of love are a case in point: “I want an experience of the world that’s iridescent and unfixed. A pure, beautiful life. And love diminishes that — at least when it attaches itself to me. It’s depleting. It’s poisonous.”

A Song for Wildcats offers up moments of loss, longing, grief, obsession, madness, and violence, each crafted with extraordinary beauty and care. The result is jarring, but the emotions, however extreme, will resonate with most. With philosophical insight, Galway has built a gilded universe as gorgeous as it is horrific, as grounded as it is alien, mixing the brutal with the exquisite to extraordinary effect.