Autopsies, Necrophiliacs, and Werewolf Pandemics: Puloma Ghosh on Translating Grief into Literary Horror

I’ve known Puloma Ghosh since we were ten years old. I am a writer because she is a writer. Our lives as writers have informed one another, starting off with trading off notebooks in the high school cafeteria with bizarre prompts inside, staying up too late watching messed up movies, screaming to Rilo Kiley in college, and now being proud of our work but slightly ashamed to share it with our mothers.

We are both fascinated by horror and the uncanny,  but approach it in different ways. I do a finger-guns approach to horror; I like how much a laugh can sound like a scream. Her writing, however, feels like a long nail stroking me on the cheek: sensual and entrancing, but where the hell did the nail come from and is it going to hurt me? A scream, for her, can come from fear or pleasure.

Mouth has this and more, expertly teetering the line between desire and fear. There are werewolf pandemics, autopsies of lovers, holes at parties. There are human sacrifices. Her prose is meticulous, sharp, tender and shocking. Ahead of Mouth’s June release, I got to speak with my best friend about her debut collection. We talked about generational grief, being attracted to cosmic beings, the burden of being a daughter, and more.

–Melissa Lozada-Oliva

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Melissa Lozada-Oliva: This collection felt so familiar as I read it, which is the magic of reading something your best friend wrote. I see moments from our lives turned into small details, or something you’ve always been obsessed with become a plot point. At the same time, I felt like I was seeing a side of you I don’t usually, like I was inside of your head.

Perhaps it comes back to writing truly being a solitary act; nobody can actually see thoughts forming in our heads and every epiphany ultimately happens on our own, even if collaboration was involved. My first question is: Given how intimate, creepy, delicious and disgusting this collection is, how do you feel having it out in the world, for all to see?

Puloma Ghosh: Depends on the context. Standalone, professionally, to my friends and fellow writers, the world—I’m immensely proud of my disgusting, intimate work. It’s what I love to read and watch and make.

To my parents and the aunties and uncles… I am of course embarrassed. I had my father looking up the definition for “necrophiliac” just from the jacket copy. I didn’t necessarily write any of this for their eyes, and I can’t let go of the old urge to minimize the window when I feel their gaze, snap a sketchbook shut when they walk by. Even if they read it, I hope we never have to talk about it.

MLO: There’s a lot of eating this book and of course, it’s called Mouth. Let’s talk about consumption. What is the importance, to you, of eating in writing? And more specifically, food? 

PG: The question of consumption and food almost feel separate to me. So much of writing is rooted in obsession which leads me easily to consumption. When you think about something constantly, you are consumed by it. A lot of these stories are about longing, wanting, grief, and these are things that readily consume a person.

And of course food is important in writing, because it’s something that, if healthy, we do constantly, and even if we’re not healthy, think about constantly. Have you gone a single day without thinking about eating something? And maybe because I love food, I think it can add such amazing texture to writing—it occupies all the senses. It can mean a lot of things.

MLO: In “Persimmons,” a girl must reckon with getting eaten by a tree for the sake of her town. It reminded me of “The Lottery,” “Bloodchild,” and a little bit of Perfume: Story of a Murderer (but maybe because we just watched that together once). Can you tell you what interests you in sacrifice for the community/humanity and maybe even the pagan nature of it? Can you talk to me about having to do things you don’t want to? 

PG: Pagan traditions and horrors are the best—untamable, elemental, and brutal. You never win against ancient, eldritch entities, or in the case of “Persimmons,” otherworldly forces. The community creates rituals around this thing their world is built on, but really have no idea what it is or how it functions. (Is it even a tree? Or is that just what it looks like to them?)

The sacrifice in “Persimmons” uses this type of magic to explore very literally how our communities threaten marginalized bodies and try to control them. Within that is also the old story of how women’s autonomy and desires have been historically sacrificed to support community—they are always expected to put everyone else first. It’s not that Uma is being forced to do something that she doesn’t want to do, but rather that she’s been prevented from wanting anything at all to the bitter end.

You’re also maybe the only person who could so immediately make the connection between this story and Perfume. Like, yes. That movie’s orgiastic ending has never and will never leave my brain, and I had to somehow write a whole crowd of writhing bodies on my own terms.

MLO: In a similar vein, Octavia Butler, when discussing her short story “Bloodchild,” said she was imagining a world in which human beings would have to negotiate in order to survive. Similarly, in Mouth, the characters continuously wrestle with living in their imperfect worlds.  How did you go about writing these worlds and the characters who have no choice but to live in them?

PG: I can’t imagine Octavia Butler wasn’t aware that many people already live in this world of negotiation, and wanted to use alien settings to bring it to light. That kind of work feels like the whole point of speculative fiction, and she was so, so good at it. “Imperfect world?” It honestly isn’t a far stretch at all because, don’t we currently have no choice but to live in one, and fight to make it survivable?

The Millennial coming of age was, for many, a rude awakening into our own dystopia. We also live in a society steered by machinations that take a lot of research and attention to understand on even a surface level. So it’s not difficult to write characters in weird realities with obtuse rules, who, despite its horrors, can only think about their crush. You take the anxiety we all feel and change the details. It’s almost autofiction.

MLO: What is the relationship between fear and sexuality, and similarly, the relationship between queerness and horror?

PG: Fear and arousal have a similar, very physical effect on a person. Both states kickstart your autonomic nervous system. It changes the way your blood flows, the balance of your hormones, reaches deep into your biology to prepare your body for something, and these physiological responses are often out of your control. It feels simple and natural to link these very animalistic parts of our consciousness.

Meanwhile queerness rejects the limitations set on sexuality and identity, while the supernatural horrors I like to play in reject the limitations of our world. All of these things don’t have to be connected, but can be, easily, and I’m always more than happy to draw the lines.

MLO: What, and I’m sorry to use this word, empowers you to write a sex scene, and also what does a sex scene empower in you?

PG: Maybe this is corny, but there’s a lot of beauty and vulnerability in sex. It’s deeply personal, so how a character interacts and engages with it reveals a lot. It’s also kind of gross, but in a way that people really crave. A total sensory overload that is so fun to put to paper.

For me, writing it often requires a kind of surrender, switching off the censorious, editorial parts of my brain cultivated by a rather conservative upbringing that assigned shame and secrecy to sex throughout my adolescence. Writing sex is permissive and freeing. Like, who cares? We’re all thinking about it.

MLO: In addition to the book’s focus on food and eating, I also noticed a lot about mothers. Sometimes motherhood is a way of escaping a curse, and in turn, passing a burden to somebody else, sometimes they just end up taking care of something, sometimes they have morally grey jobs.

And then, there’s the daughters parsing thru their feelings about their mothers, whether through cosmic grief or holding multiple complicated truths about them at once.  Talk to me about mommies, motherhood, daughters and burdens in your writing.

PG: I haven’t yet undertaken the challenge of writing Mommy POV, because I haven’t experienced motherhood and I think it’s a pretty singular thing that I don’t feel wise enough to try imagining just yet. Motherhood is really complicated and flawed, and a massive burden even when a mother is happy to take it on—being responsible for a life, ripping your body apart to make space for it.

From a daughter’s perspective, it’s surreal and freaky to look at this other human and know that you were once literally part of them, but they had lived a whole life before you even came into existence. That you’ve lived your own life but could possibly grow another, completely unique person with your own cells, who will never know who you were before them.

I immigrated here when I was very young and for years I spent most of my time with only my mother in a strange land. I had horrific attachment issues; it must have been equally surreal and freaky for my mother to manage.

These relationships crop up in my stories frequently because I think mothers can be uncanny and full of mystery, especially when they grew up in a completely different reality, unimaginable to their daughters. My characters try to grapple with unraveling that mystery, figuring out what their mothers know that they don’t yet, understanding how that obscure part of her life has shaped theirs.

MLO: Having finished the collection, I still think “Leaving Things,” in which a former veterinarian during a wolf pandemic has to take care of a young wolf-boy, is my favorite. As I was reading, I was like okay, cute, wait is she going to fuck her wolf stepson? Reader—you will simply have to find out. What inspired this story?

PG: Just for the record, this reads like a pandemic lockdown story, but I wrote it in its entirety pre-COVID, and only later saw the parallels in editing. There’s a very silly answer to this and it is: I was listening to a song called “Losing in a Sense” by a long disbanded group called Bandit, and the opening words were “The wolf of Chicago sleeps / With his pride at his side / Every night on a mattress / In the living room of his aunt’s apartment” and I thought, what if there was literally a wolf sleeping on a mattress in the living room.

The rest of the story was a series of questions—how did he get there? What are the rules of his wolfishness? Slowly my thoughts drifted away from the wolf and toward the woman sheltering it, who became an amalgamation of insecurities harbored by young women: Am I lovable? Am I good for anything? Will I become my mother? Is there anywhere I belong?

MLO: “Leaving Things” also made me think about how we grew up watching anthropomorphized animals that we felt attracted to (Simba with a mullet, excuse me….) and how characters in this collection are drawn to other-worldly entities: vampires, time cryptids, shadow people at parties, nips. What interests you in having characters be attracted to the non-human; not just animals, but cosmic things?

PG: This obsession can definitely be traced back to the unconscionable amount of gothic romance and fantasy YA I read between the ages of like, nine and sixteen. So much Anne Rice. Anime, too. There’s a lot of mystery in attraction, and what’s more mysterious than an otherworldly entity you can never fully fathom?

I’m also interested in the lengths people will go to attain someone they desire. Making that person non-human stretches that into the absurd. Like: Take my humanity. Have my body. Rip me apart. Eat me, literally. As long as I can be yours.

MLO: In “Natalya” somebody does an autopsy on an old lover. Tell me about your research for this.

PG: I first conceived of this story because one of my parents’ friends does autopsies and spent some time at a dinner party telling me about this one examination she did where the guy’s arms wouldn’t stay down. I wrote this shortly after.

Several drafts later, I did some real research because I had a couple of readers tell me that the autopsy parts were a little too vague and romantic, and one of my professors pointed out that people actually love to read procedural things, so getting more clinical might make it more fun. I read a lot of actual autopsies and also some practice autopsies done by medical students to help me find verbiage for the more technical passages.

I reorganized the story, to see if the headers and subheaders in an autopsy document would bring some cohesion to this web of nostalgia and memory, and that felt right. Also, I had my friend in vet school (close enough) read it at different stages for jargon accuracy. Thanks Samantha!

MLO: For some reason I don’t initially understand this book as a book about grief, and maybe it’s because I was distracted by the sexy monsters of it all. But obviously, every character’s dealing with a kind of loss.  Even when somebody isn’t specifically grieving another person, there’s something they’re longing for that is now gone. Talk to me about personal and generational grief in this collection.

PG: Some stories are very directly about grieving a person who is gone or dead. But you can grieve any number of things—there are characters grieving lovers who they’re no longer with, places they can never return to, their own past selves.

There’s also some immigrant grief emanating from their parents: Meghna’s mother is completely alone in her community when her husband disappears, Ankita’s mother could never again feel at home in the country she left. I think sometimes generational grief manifests in the dissonance created by your parents preparing you for the world they know, which has nothing to do with the world you live in. It sets up expectations for the trajectory of your life that has to be killed and grieved each time you realize something is impossible.

The characters in Mouth reset their expectations a lot as their world becomes increasingly surreal and hostile—men culled, wolves overtaking, rips in spacetime. In all the stories there’s a loss that catapults them into unraveling.

MLO: What sort of demon left you, if any, after finishing this collection?

PG: Youthful angst. This deep, wrenching ennui I felt for my teens and 20s, lost in the sauce of mental illness and lack of fulfillment that stemmed from not understanding what I wanted. That’s why these characters are so submissive to all the fanged creatures that approach them—it’s an expression of both the unease and self-hatred that defined this period, that made me imagine every character I created being chewed up and swallowed.

I feel a lot better now, more healed and self-aware, and would like to go forth writing stories that allow its characters to become more than just a hungry thing’s meal.

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Mouth by Puloma Ghosh is available via Astra House.