No & Other Love Stories by Kirsty Logan review: 'unforgettably vivid'

The settings for the stories range from the mediaeval convent for wayward girls first conjured up in Logan’s 2023 fantasy novel Now She Is Witch, through wartime London, to the badlands of North America, and a Scottish city touched by the fever-dream quality of Alasdair Gray’s Unthank, or Louise Welsh’s Glasgow in The Cutting Room.

Yet everywhere, Logan has her own distinctive tone and vision, a profound sense of the pulsing depth and intensity of women’s physical lives, driven by the monthly cycles of blood and moonlight; and her message seems twofold. First, that male violence towards women is everywhere, always; a point perhaps most vividly made in Darling, a story composed partly of a television script for an American cop show about sexual crimes, and partly of the notes and reflections of the actress (all too easily identifiable, for those who know their New York cop series) who once used to play the lead.

And secondly - even more vividly - she wants to make it clear that women can be violent too, in both their desires and their rage. So in the opening story, Piglet, a woman is seized by a consuming desire for a fat, muscular butcher whom she sees in the window of his shop. She seduces and marries him, but is too ravenous to stop there; gradually, she becomes him, the one who chops and dismembers, who lives among the smell of blood, and who lays her sexual partner out like a carcass, with every cut labelled and priced.

This link between voracious sexual desire and the eating of meat or drinking of blood haunts Logan’s stories, which pulsate with tales of gouging and blood sucking, and feature at least two memorable vampires, including a male one shacked up in an old city house with an ageing woman who refuses to share his immortality, and a female one who visits a repressed teenage girl every time she has her period, and sucks her voluminous blood to the accompaniment of colossal orgasms, boldly exposing the full sexual subtext of the Dracula myth.

And if her happiest stories involve partnerships between women who understand each other’s rages and lusts, even here there are deep shadows to be negotiated or suppressed, notably in Honey, a story in which a gay woman whose wife is about to give birth finds herself feeding strips of raw meat to the wasps in a giant nest in their garden shed, which her partner thinks she has destroyed.

As always, there are questions about how far, and where, the unforgettably vivid landscape of dream and nightmare conjured up by Logan truly connects with the lived reality of women’s lives now. The men here are all ciphers, weak and boring at best, murderous at worst, ridiculous always. The women, while strong and varied, are also calculating and cruel, except towards their current object of lust. Pregnancies happen, but there are no living children to nurture, no real motives beyond greed and desire, and an intense personal yearning for self-fulfilment.

Logan is a writer who says “No” to patriarchy, in other words, and all the evils it has spawned. So far, though, she says “yes” only to a world in which women are fully free to become the devouring demons, beasts, killers and witches that misogynists have always feared. And if a story like Trussed offers a more positive vision of women who love women, down the generations, and who build something together, it is the briefest glimpse; still mainly eclipsed by the glint of the butcher’s knife, and the image of blood flowing, under the cold light of the moon.

No & Other Love Stories, by Kirsty Logan, Harvill Secker, £16.99