I Can Fix Her by Rae Wilde

Hell is a reality-warping toxic relationship

I Can Fix Her is a short, highly imaginative, rip-roaring novel that centers on a toxic relationship that rapidly disintegrates into an outrageous reality-warping narrative that eventually shreds reality itself. Featuring dragon dogs, flooded cities, and a Groundhog Day-esque time loop, it is fresh, original, and utterly batshit. Great stuff.

The setup: Johnny is still desperately in love with her indifferent ex, Alice. After a chance encounter, Alice invites Jonny back to her apartment. At first, Johnny takes some spiteful pleasure in the crummy nature of the apartment Alice now calls home since the two of them split. Her mission, of course, is to win Alice back and prove to her how much better her life is when they’re together.

But the more time Johnny spends with Alice, the stranger things get.

After spending the night, Johnny wakes up the next morning to discover some details of the world have changed. Most notably, Alice’s hair style is wildly different and her pet dog, Lucy, is now gigantic — if not a different breed entirely.

Alice doesn’t care. She shrugs it all off. Makes Johnny feel weird for noticing. Classic gaslighting. But there’s something undeniably and disconcertingly creepy about Johnny’s newly discombobulating reality. And this is just the beginning of the horrors that await.

The next day, Lucy is barely even a dog anymore: she now has three heads, breathes fire, and smashes through windows to go fly around the city.

And it keeps on getting weirder…

Before the novel ends its sprint through madness, Alice’s apartment will have sunk beneath the ocean, Johnny will have been repeatedly harassed by an unknown caller, and there will be at least one dead body to deal with.

I Can Fix Her is a fantasy of reunion that quickly turns into a wonderfully weird nightmare. It is made clear from the very beginning of the story that Alice is a toxic lover: in the very first scene, she abandons a date with another woman to take Johnny home instead. But it seems painfully obvious that Alice’s intention is never to romance Johnny, but merely to toy with her. And as the story progresses, we understand just how cruel she can be.

Unfortunately for Johnny, she’s so head over heels for Alice, she simply doesn’t recognize just how toxic of a partner Alice is. Theirs is the dictionary definition of a one-sided relationship: Johnny loves Alice, all she wants is for Alice to love her in return, yet Alice continually treats her appallingly.

It’s so bad in fact, it has metastasized beyond merely a tragic pattern and become a full-blown inescapable spiral that grows continually more horrific and unhinged. A bizarre blackhole of trauma that nothing can escape.

External forces apparently converge as if to underline this fact. Yet as reality rapidly distorts and warps all around them, Johnny and Alice’s unhealthy relationship continues to fester the same as it ever was. Alice is a bitch to Johnny, but Johnny still longs for her regardless.

Perhaps the true horror in I Can Fix Her, then, is not all the crazy shit that swirls around our protagonist, but rather her complicity in her own torture. She is not only a willing participant in this relationship of parasitic abuse, she enables her own destruction by refusing to leave it.

Sitting at the nexus of existential and cosmic horror, I Can Fix Her is a sharp, wicked, and wonderfully articulated reality-warping narrative with surprising depth and nuance.