How To Bring Him Back by Claire HM

 

How To Bring Him Back by Claire HM

A Fly on the Wall Short, published 8th October 2021 by Fly on the Wall Press.

From the cover of the book:

If I was going to cast a spell tonight, this night of a full arse moon as stark and crunchy as a ten-day crust of snow, I’d start by telling the earth to spin in the opposite direction.
By what power?
By the power of my pen.

It’s 90s Birmingham and post-university, but Cait’s aspirations haven’t taken her far from her council estate beginnings. Living in a bedsit and working in a bar, she’s caught between two best friends: Stadd, who’s stable, funny, compatible as a friend, and her compulsive sexual attraction with Rik. 

Present day Cait picks up her pen, on her yearly writing retreat to the sea, and discovers she’s finally ready to conjure an absent Stadd with an apology based on the lessons she has learnt from her chaotic past.

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Published as part of the Fly on the Wall Shorts series, How to Bring Him Back is the kind of novella that packs a weighty emotional punch, despite its relative brevity at only 67 pages.

The story swings between the present (2018) as writer Cait reflects on her chaotic past and the choices she made; and the mid 1990s when she was living a tumultuous post-university existence using drugs and alcohol to numb the reality of her life, and caught in a warped love triangle with bad boy Rik and his best friend, the kind and stable Stadd.

In the present, Cait has reached a turning point in her life where she feels able to rationalise the disastrous decisions of her youth through her writing. Looking back, she can see that her passionate liaison with Rik was a symptom of her own self-destructive bent and her inability to keep away from him not only damaged her, but also Stadd in the way she betrayed the steady devotion he offered her. As she follows the therapeutic process of writing a form of apology to Stadd in her journal, desperately trying to weave a literary spell that will roll back to the past so she can make amends, she also lays out the history of what happened between her, Stadd and Rik all those years ago.

This is a story that cuts to the bone. The language is raw and unflinching, with an intriguing writing style that spills out across the pages like a stream of consciousness, as Cait's thoughts bounce around her mind. At times it is very distressing to listen to the inner voice of her past self as she spins out of control, moving from one harmful scene to the next, stuck in a toxic cycle from which she seems unable to break free - until she realises too late that her chance for something more was there all the time. However, it is not until many years later that she can acknowledge the full impact her behaviour had on Stadd, and this makes this ever so relatable to anyone looking back on the rashness of their own youth.

There is something so intimate and powerful about how Cait describes her physical sensations and the way she interacts bodily with her surroundings and the people around her - the sights, sounds, tastes and smells are so vividly expressed that reading this novella becomes a detailed sensory experience, that enhances the emotional impact of the piece beautifully.

The way Claire HM writes of the darkness within, guilt, the search for redemption, and making peace with the past is really compelling, and there are delicious echoes of the both Heidi James and Naomi Booth in this novella that really tickled my literary taste buds, making this so enjoyable to consume. I would love to read a full blown novel from this author, because this is a very impressive piece of work. Highly recommended if you like reading something that hits you right in the feels!

How to Bring Him Back is available to buy now direct from Fly on the Wall Press HERE.

Thank you to Isabelle Kenyon at Fly on the Wall Press for sending me a copy of this novella in return for an honest review, and for inviting me to be part of this blog tour.

About the author:

Claire HM is a fiction writer, poet and teacher based in (and writing about) her home city of Birmingham. In 2018 she had an essay published in the anthology, I Wrote it Anyway, about her experience of accessing university and the long journey of finding the confidence to write as a woman in her forties from a working-class background.

Her work is now published in a growing number of literary publications, including Tears in the Fence, Magma, The Rialto, streetcake, Coven Journal and in Cape Magazine.