In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
The stories and novella in Rose Keating’s collection are marvelously dark and deeply empathetic.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“Ten lurid stories of magic, metamorphosis, and real-world longing…Keating builds a macabre world in which her characters are utterly free even within their various compulsions, constraints, and grotesque circumstances. Compassionate, gross, deeply compelling. A must-read.”
In her own words, here is Rose Keating’s Book Notes music playlist for her story collection Oddbody:
I can’t write in silence. When first drafting this collection, I would sometimes try and sit in quiet libraries, empty cafes. The sound of my fingers on the keyboard, gulp of my throat swallowing water, a cough that I’d try to subdue, all drove me insane. They made me so aware of myself, my surroundings, my presence at the seat that I would struggle to concentrate on anything but the noise of my own body. Even while alone, hearing my breath go into my lungs makes me wince.
I always write to music. Every story in Oddbody was written with something playing in the background. The real playlist I use to write with is 124 songs long. When working I leave it on shuffle and try to forget that I am listening at all. The tone of many of the songs are similar; most are moody, soft, dark, hypnotic, sometimes a little repetitive. The length and feel of the playlist is intentional as I like to drift off into it in a way that lets me zero in on the writing, while forgetting about where I am in a room.
Writing about all 124 of the songs seems a little much. When I get into a good rhythm with a song that has me focused in a more intense way, I will usually switch from shuffle to repeat and listen to it over and over for hours of writing; these are the songs that I tended to do that the most with.
Fantasy – DyE
If there was one song that I listened more than any other while writing Oddbody, it was this one. It does exactly what I need it do; it is low, soothing, repetitious, a little melancholic and not distracting. Listening to it also makes me feel like I am 13 again and watching its very unsettling music video on Youtube for the first time. The short-animated video depicts young people sneaking into a swimming pool at night, touching and kissing in the water. There is a potent anxiety and tense excitement to the clip, which suddenly devolves into Lovecraftian madness. The song fills me with a kind of sickly tenderness and unease simultaneously; I listened to this one a lot while writing The Test and thinking about teen years.
Hellmouth – Choir Boy
Almost every single song from Choir Boy’s album Passive with Desire could have made it on to this list. I listened to the album on repeat during the autumn of my masters, a period when a big chunk of the collection was written. The album is nostalgic, gothic, slightly camp, haunting. The aesthetics of the album charmed me greatly; childhood Halloween costumes, blurry Polaroids, plastic fangs, boxy old TVs, lurid fake blood. In the lyrics dead dogs, suicidal ideation and Buffy the Vampire Slayer references abound. Hellmouth had a very specific sentimental magnetism to it, and it helped greatly in solidifying the tone I wanted to achieve in the story ‘Bela Lugosi Isn’t Dead’.
A Better Son/Daughter – Rilo Kiley
A Better Son/Daughter was one I listened to a lot while writing and editing Next to Cleanliness. The dark, blunt lyrics and playful, jaunty vibe felt so appropriate while first drafting that story. The main character, Catherine, is seeking out ways to fix herself, her sadness, her incorrectness, and become a kind of better, cleaner, healthier version of herself – I think she would like this song a lot.
Hares on the Mountain – Shirley Collins
Speaking of dark but jaunty. This song is the musical equivalent of a threatening smile. Its folksy, light instrumentation and upbeat rhythm belie ominous words that feel like gritted teeth. A lot of the characters in Oddbody have a certain passivity. We often associate passivity with apathy or fear, but I think sometimes you can be so angry it becomes difficult to even move. Rage is a heavy thing; it can turn you to stone, can be paralyzing, when left inside. This song often made me think of that feeling; a stilted, tense anger that is brimming just beneath an amusing façade.
Strangers – Ethel Cain
Ethel Cain as an artist is someone who encourages me so much. Her work is shocking, raw, experimental, visceral, and her earnest sensibilities as an artist are refreshing and needed in an era of vapid and superficial irony poisoning. Preacher’s Daughter is an album that I think about a lot when I think about how to talk about womanhood, how to talk about desire, how to talk about wounds, how to talk about fear. I keep coming back to the word brave when I think about her music, but I think what I actually mean is ambitiously honest, uncomfortable, and devastating. Strangers is a song that undoes me every I listen to it. Outside of the aesthetics of the album which I unsurprisingly love, the tenderness beneath the horror of this narrative, of Ethel Cain’s story, is incredibly inspiring at a craft level and at human level; her music, particularly this song, made me reconsider how to go about writing towards pain.
Nights – Totally Mild
This was a song I found very late into the writing of the collection. I now will forever associate it with The Vegetable, the final story in the collection and one of the last ones to be written. The Vegetable is a story about paralysis, on many different levels. The sheep-plants of the story are stuck in one place, as is the central figure Bridget, both trapped on the ever-same farm they inhabit. When the possibility of change arrives for these characters, it is something that appears seductive regardless of the potential harm the change represents. This song felt so accurate to that sentiment; there is something sensual, rhythmic and seductive in it, but also a gently nightmarish quality of danger in its tone too.
Pause – Katie Kim
Settings in Oddbody vary, but not too much. All the stories in the collection are set in fantastical worlds, but they are also all set in Ireland. I’m not always thinking specifically of my own home in Waterford, but they always take place in an Irish context. However, when I am thinking of home, when I write with that setting in mind, I am also always going to listen to Katie Kim. Cover and Flood was the soundtrack to my later teen years, and when I think of Waterford, or when I think of growing up, I think of the music from that. Pause is slow, eerie, and almost uncanny at points, with clashing piano keys and plaintive vocals. It’s also wistful in a way that makes me so homesick I could vomit. When I was trying to write about girlhood and memory in stories like Bela Lugosi Isn’t Dead and The Test, songs like Pause helped me zero in with focus and accuracy.
Evil – Interpol
In Oddbody, characters and creatures that are monstrous in some form become figures of companionship and connection for the protagonists of the stories. These figures are at turns sadistic, cruel and often actively harmful, while at other points full of sincere affection and care for the women they attach themselves to. In the titular story Oddbody, the ghost companion of Doireann encourages her suicide while playing Monopoly together and gossiping. Bela of Bela Lugosi Isn’t Dead is a predatory and unhealthy creature who attempts to prevent young Saoirse’s transition into adulthood; he also wants to make her happy and plays Britney Spears to her while on a ship shooting fireworks in the air. I am very interested in the juxtaposition of these elements, the way that things we should fear we are often draw to, how danger and desire can overlap. Evil is a song that is palpably sinister, but is also jubilantly energetic, joyfully frightening and full of troubling glee, and it’s a song that made me think about how those contradictory things can sit side by side in our art.
You Want it Darker – Leonard Cohen
Body horror is used throughout this collection, but I also consider that term to mean a few different things. Body horror can be blood, guts, bones, bodies being torn apart and brutalized. It can also be Cronenberg-esque; strange things happening to the body, mutations, corruptions, changes outside of our control. Those elements are part of these stories, but the real core of the body horror in this collection for me is a more inward looking one; the horror that we all exist in bodies that will one day die, and that day is getting closer and closer. Death is at the heart of Oddbody, anxiety around loss, grief, and anguish towards our own terrifying mortality. I listened to Leonard Cohen’s final album a lot while writing this book, an album that looks at death through a direct and sometimes furious gaze. To speak about death is difficult, because it’s somewhat boring in its inevitability and universality, and also overwhelming and breathtaking and beyond articulation for the exact reasons. The courage and truthfulness of Cohen’s articulation was very affecting for me as a person and as a writer when considering how to talk about death.
Your Best American Girl – Mitski
I almost didn’t put this on my list, although it’s the song that comes to mind first when I think about the music that inspired this book. Your Best American Girl is a song written by a Japanese-American musician that speaks to that specific cultural experience. I am an Irish woman writing towards Irishness, which is a different specific cultural experience. Although that difference is important, this song contained something painful and raw that spoke to a feeling I’d had and could understand, even though my context is not the same as this artist. In this song, Mitski gets at a feeling of wrongness. Of being out of place and wanting to be the kind of person that can be deserving of the place you are in, the people in your life, of care, of home. It mourns a perceived lack in the speaker/singer, a lack of fitting into the place she occupies, of having the wrong upbringing, the wrong childhood, the wrong personhood. The most poignant part of this song for me is an expression of wanting to reshape oneself into the right kind of person, this inevitable attempt to self-correct into an acceptable person who could be wanted and loved. In Oddbody, oddness, wrongness, comes from within, not without; the characters carry strangeness in themselves and attempt to navigate worlds where they don’t quite know how to be a person or how to belong. To be out of step with the home and body you find yourself is a painful, complicated thing, and this song encapsulates that feeling in a beautiful way.
Rose Keating is a writer from Waterford, Ireland. She received an MA in creative writing prose fiction from the University of East Anglia, where she was a recipient of the Malcolm Bradbury Scholarship and the Curtis Brown Prize. She is a winner of the Marian Keyes Young Writer Award, the Hot Press Write Here, Write Now Prize, and the Ted and Mary O’Regan Arts Bursary. She has been published in The Stinging Fly, Apex Magazine, Banshee, and Southword. In 2022, she received an Agility Award from the Irish Arts Council.