Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Some have claimed that what they see as the current domination of women writers has made it hard for men to get published. Those hand-wringers can rest easy though — two of the most exciting new novels I’ve read in the past couple of months are debuts by young men: Allen Bratton’s Henry Henry, a queer reimagining of Shakespeare’s Henriad; and Gabriel Smith’s Brat: A Ghost Story.About to turn 30, suffering from writer’s block, recently dumped, and having just buried his father, the narrator — the titular “brat” (real name Gabriel) — isn’t exactly having a great time. He’s also back in the house he grew up in, to clear it out ready to sell it. Most troubling, however, is how his skin has started peeling off: sheet by large translucent sheet, like “wet paper napkin[s]”. Not that anyone seems to care. Not even his plastic surgeon brother.As bizarre as this already sounds, it soon gets a lot weirder. In his mother’s old study, Gabriel finds a manuscript, which seems to change every time he reads it. As does the footage of an old home video tape that he also discovers; on which there’s a recording of his mother with a different husband — not Gabriel’s father — and two children who aren’t him and his brother. Is it just a coincidence that a boy and girl keep turning up telling him not to sell the house? Although we doubt its saleability; tiles start falling off the roof, the inside walls are being colonised by black mould, and creepers are burrowing their way through the brickwork. It’s suddenly crumbling before Gabriel’s eyes. He, however, is more distracted by the feeling that he’s being watched. And is that a man wearing a fur suit and a deer mask skulking about in the garden at night?His brother refuses to acknowledge the worst of it all. Or perhaps he simply can’t see what Gabriel can. Family members are frustrating like that; we all have our individual blind spots. Nor can their mother answer any of the questions Gabriel has. She’s in a nursing home suffering from the early stages of dementia.Smith evokes a distressingly potent sense of disquiet. Brat is a piece of suburban gothic, the rules of engagement between characters, and the sense of time all operating with the unhinged logic of a nightmare. This disjointedness is amplified by the vignette-like structure of the narrative. It’s written in short, sharp bursts of action, savvy dialogue, or interiority. And similar to the way in which a dreamer might know that something in particular has happened, yet not have witnessed it first-hand, there are odd vacuums in the narrative. When, for example, the narrator loses time — “I woke up hungover in my childhood bedroom. I was still wearing my shoes and trousers. My white shirt had quite a lot of blood on it. My head hurt under my face” — so do we.Smith is the grandson of the Booker-nominated Scottish novelist Shena Mackay, whose own suburban-set works won her the barbed accolade “the supreme lyricist of daily grot”. Brat suggests he’s already firmly following in her footsteps, with more surreal influences from recent novels by the likes of Helen Phillips, Mona Awad and Holly Pester. Gabriel’s descriptions suggest a disassociation from his own body — see that peculiar separation of “head” and “face” quoted above. This pervading sense of the uncanny is also amplified by his use of unusual, slightly off-kilter terms of description: books on a landing shelf that he designates as “ambient,” as opposed to more meaningful volumes that “belonged to someone in particular”.All family homes are haunted houses, but whether Gabriel’s being haunted or doing the haunting, we’re never quite sure. Memories are malleable, his grandmother (who’s also a writer — Brat teases us with its nods to autofiction) reminds him, and “[w]hen someone dies it becomes a competition to be in charge of the history of that person. People want their memory to be the real one.” Full of dark, deadpan humour, Brat is a raucous story of the messy, messed-up business of living, dying and having a family.Brat: A Ghost Story by Gabriel Smith Scribner £16.99, 336 wordsJoin our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
