Epeolatry Book Review: The Mouth is a Coven by Liz Worth

Liz Worth’s eighth book, The Mouth is a Coven is set in a fictional city in the 1990s. The story centres around two lovers, Blue and Julie, obsessed with the idea of becoming vampires. They will do whatever it takes to achieve their ascension. Taking loose inspiration from the infamous 1996 Vampire Clan murders set in Florida, the book dances around an ensemble of characters willing to lose what little they have to fulfill a spurious fantasy.

Described as a ‘conceptual vampire novel’ that attempts a different take on the genre, Worth tells the story in a lyrical, fairytale style, replete with the chorus, “There’s a story in Starling City…” (Surely the characters would appreciate this constituting a drinking game; it is repeated so often it feels infused with a knowing smirk.) The experimental lens points firmly outside mainstream literary fiction and adds a psychic distance that teeters on dissociation. This mirrors the unreliable narrators’ loose-and-slipping grasp on reality as seen fittingly through a haze of meditative occult rituals, drugs, and late nights at the local goth club.

While the atmosphere pays dutiful homage to the era’s grunge scene and the melodrama of the protagonists’ working-class quarter-life crisis, the focus never gets quite sharp enough to convey any sense of urgency. If you’re looking for strong character development, a page-flipping thriller or imagery that shares the emotional experience with the reader, you might be disappointed here. You’ll be hard-pushed to picture the characters, let alone intuit their responses or glean any gratification from the outcome. The inhabitants of Starling City serve as functioning cogs in this subdued theatre of the macabre, with Blue and Julie being our main observer-inheritors at the end of the carnage that unfolds just as soundlessly. The reader is kept at arm’s length, which is in itself a push-you-pull-you kind of haunting.

You might like this if you find joy in more off-beat vamp flicks like Byzantium, Only Lovers Left Alive, Let the Right One In, or teen goth witch odes like The Craft—The Mouth is a Coven similarly places magic and ritual in a modern urban setting, especially one where every scrap available is infused with sacred significance. Elsewhere, things horrifyingly just happen, as does Julie’s inexplicable tragic fate, and a peculiarly gory garden scene witnessed from an upstairs window. One thing this book does well is show up a naive, ambling spirituality for the hollow grandeur it bears. It’s a perfect example of the horror of asking “and then what?” without end.

Content warnings: Violence (graphic), bloodplay (moderate), suicidal ideation, dissociation (minor)

/5

Available from Manta Press , Bookshop, and Amazon.