What Lurks in the Peripheries: From Urban Margins to Marginal Genres in Short Stories by Margo Lanagan and Ariadna Castellarnau

Abstract

This chapter explores the disaggregation and strangeness that increases when urban landscapes merge with suburban panoramas. When trespassing these liminal areas, a sense of in-betweenness brings about a lapse of uncertainty. The literature of the fantastic, in its search for “reality detours,” can profit from this singular scenario where space constitutes an unstable context. The present analysis focuses on two short story collections: Margo Lanagan’s Black Juice (2004) and Ariadna Castellarnau’s La oscuridad es un lugar (2020). While these narratives use realistic materials, there are cracks into reality in them that result in spatial distortions. The fantastic or unusual space is at the crossroads between the center-periphery and stasis-mobility dualisms. There are also recurrent transitions between the solid and realistic dimension of life in human settlements and the transient and imaginary side of existence on the outside. The correlation between these variables is almost regular. Drawing on the productive systematicity of this connection, this chapter illuminates the intersection of spatial borders with the conceptualization of liminal or hybrid genres such as the Unusual, the Weird, and the Eerie.