Ivy Grimes: The Deep Freeze of Memory: What My Grandmother Kept in the Dark

Ivy Grimes: The Deep Freeze of Memory: What My Grandmother Kept in the Dark

“Why don’t you go down to the basement with me and we’ll get some ice cream from the deep freeze?” my Grandmother Grimes would say. 

Aboveground, her house was filled with daffodils, rabbit figurines, cheerful stenciling on the yellow kitchen cabinets. It always felt like spring. But open the door to the left of the kitchen, and you’d feel the cold breath of the basement and look down the gray stairs where my grandmother once fell and fractured her back.  

I was afraid to go down there alone, but of course, I also found it exciting. A bare bulb lit the way to the bottom of the stairs, where she cautioned you to hold tight to the cold metal railing. 

The scary things down there: rusted tools, peeling red paint on the walls, a doomed echo, harsh fluorescent lights, the mysterious secret passage of the laundry chute. There were ancestral locked cabinets a person could have been lost inside. And trunks filled with what? I never looked. The only life down there were creatures my siblings and I called “spider crickets.” They had eight legs and could jump higher than your head. 

On the bright side: a ping-pong table, small windows with views of lush greenery or winter sticks, and a deep freeze filled with treats. She filled some empty plastic milk jugs with water and froze them there in case of emergencies. She was often thinking about emergencies. She kept groceries she got on sale, giant tubs of vanilla ice cream, seasonal treats like eggnog she also enjoyed in unseasonal times. The top of a wedding cake. Empty Cool Whip containers that held – who knows what? I never checked. 

When I was there at night, I did my best not to think about what lay outside and below the house. About the shadows of creepy pines, about little bright eyes under the deck or in the ivy, about what was stored in closed cabinets and locked doors. I loved both of my grandmothers, but I never fully knew them. I knew what they kept aboveground. Neither of them hid from me. I was the one who was afraid to look in the dark places. Of them, of myself, of everyone. 

Part of growing up, making my own way into my crone season, has meant looking beneath things. I’m still afraid of almost everything, and no one would call me a brave person. But the older I get, the more natural it seems to me that darkness lives below the light. I like to poke around there now, see what’s lurking in the shadows. One major way I do this is through writing my odd stories where I can embrace my feelings of eeriness and discomfort with the ways of the world. 

In my novella The Cellar Below the Cellar, a stern grandma is a prominent character. She’s cranky, but I’m fond of her. Both of my real grandmothers were very sweet, and you’d have a hard time seeing either of them in my Grandma character. But if you ever looked beneath their sweetness, you’d find discernment, doggedness, fierceness, impetuous generosity, and determination.

We all have a space where we keep our secrets, including the ones we don’t know about ourselves. Crones know how to protect strange things. If you open the covers of my book, you’ll find oddities and ice cream, games and locked cabinets. Whether you like exploring down there or not, you’re always invited. 

The Cellar Below the Cellar by Ivy Grimes

A playfully dark folk horror inspired by the fairy tale “Vasilisa the Beautiful” and the mythology around Frau Perchta, set under the blazing sky of endless auroras.

When a wild solar storm wipes out all electronics and traps Jane at her grandmother’s house in the woods, she is forced to start a new life off-grid as part of a small, isolated community.

However, there is something very strange about her new neighbors, and the longer she lives under the eerie glow of the auroras, the more she feels her grandmother may be hiding unsettling secrets.

To have any hope in her new world, Jane must find the courage to step into her power and claim her identity, but that would mean facing whatever hides in the cellar below the cellar—a place that seems to be waiting for her.

Full of delightfully weird surprises and off-kilter characters, this adult coming-of-age story explores themes of female empowerment, spirituality, identity, and community. For fans of Kelly Link, Karen Russell, Otessa Moshfegh, and Leonora Carrington.

“Ivy Grimes has a one-of-a-kind voice and is at her best here! A wonderfully strange surreal coming-of-age story of an already-grown woman who still needs to come into her own.” —Christi Nogle, author of the Bram Stoker Award® winning novel, Beulah

“The Cellar Below the Cellar possesses a wild sense of wonder married to a sense of menace—one juxtaposed against the other in a frame that keeps disappearing when you stare too long at the overlap of the two.” —TJ Price, author of The Disappearance of Tom Nero

This title is distributed through Independent Publishers Group. Retailers, if you are interested in stocking this title, please reach out to IPG at orders@ipgbooks.com.

Ivy Grimes

Ivy Grimes is originally from Birmingham, Alabama and currently lives in Virginia. She has an MFA from the University of Alabama. Her stories have appeared in The Baffler, Vastarien, hex, Maudlin House, ergot., Potomac Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of the collection Glass Stories (Grimscribe Press) and The Ghosts of Blaubart Mansion (Cemetery Gates). To learn more, please visit www.ivyivyivyivy.com

WEBSITE LINKS

Author website: https://ivyivyivyivy.com/

Substack: https://ivygrimes.substack.com/

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