Supplication by Nour Abi-Nakhoul
High-brow cerebral literature blended with gonzo crazy trash.
Where on Earth do I even start when talking about this book?
Probably with the cover — a striking painting of a putrid flower melting/crying/dripping down the page. It’s a vivid image and one which is unconventional for a horror novel cover, and yet it’s highly suggestive of its genre. And oddly intriguing.
I gravitated to the book based solely on the cover. (There were precious little other clues about what the novel was about from its minimal three-sentence blurb.)
I took a chance on it, and boy did the book take me for a ride!
Make no mistake, Supplication is an incredibly challenging read. I’ve never read any Thomas Pincheon, but this is just the sort of prose I imagine when I hear his work being discussed.
Abi-Nakhoul’s writing style is not exactly stream-of-consciousness, per se, but it’s fair to say it’s in that neighborhood.
Not that I’m against literary horror (exhibit A), but starting out I did find it tricky to get into this book as I found its style like trudging through piranha-infested molasses.
Pro tip: set aside a chunk of time and sprint through the first couple of chapters as quickly as possible. You can always go back and better appreciate the stylistic choices later, but this is how I (after a few aborted attempts) finally cracked the code of making a satisfactory dent in the book — and by the end of chapter two I was hooked!
Supplication puts us solidly within the protagonist’s consciousness. Which is not always the most comfortable place to be. She is acutely aware of minutia of the world around her, the activities of insects, the details of a flower… She is so oriented on these details at times that the macro elements of the world are a blur — all of which is highly effective in articulating the mind state of the character.
Plot-wise, a woman is held captive in a creep’s basement… He stabs her but then she escapes… A tentacled creature comes out of her bathtub’s tap and squirms up inside her… And then a whole lot of utterly bizarre and horror-adjacent things occur.
This is a very weird book.
It’s dense and cerebral in style, yet shares DNA with the likes of Frank Henenlotter, David Lynch, and Gabriel Abrantes in content.
Not everything makes sense. Characters pop up, mysteriously vanish, then reappear later on.
The protagonist is a victim, but also commits some terrible acts. But she is neither hero nor villain. She is somewhere in between. She is both. She is neither.
(And if that last paragraph was frustrating to process, then just wait until you read the book! That’s nothing! NOTHING!)
The narrative follows a dreamlike logic, and the protagonist seems to float through the series of strange occurrences that befall her and the weird situations in which she finds herself. She participates, but not entirely actively. It’s almost like the entire thing is a terrible nightmare.
Reality slips away. The flower melts. The painting slithers off the canvas.
Supplication is not a fun read. It is, for the most part, a very difficult and frustrating read. But it is fun at times, too.
It’s nutty, weird, inspiring art.
It’s disturbing. It’s hallucinatory.
It’s like nothing else I’ve read.
And I’m not sure that I’d want to.
But it’s amazing that this exists at all. It’s a truly unique piece of horror fiction that lingers in your mind long after it is finished.