Sometime during COVID, my wife Onjuli & I started talking about writing a horror novel. I think we were restless, after a long time cooped up in our apartment with our cat. We missed Europe, which felt locked away from our little Berlin bubble; we missed crowded, messy nights at bars with everyone we knew around us; we missed feeling like your town was something to saunter through and own, and not something that needed to be avoided. We wrote a novel to reclaim all of those things, and to make space for the nameless dread we felt about the future all the time. Obviously, what we actually wrote was a horror novel about being trapped.
FEAST WHILE YOU CAN comes out October 29 this year. You can read more about it (and see the, in my opinion, extremely sexy cover) over on our Insta. I’m definitely going to talk about it more leading up to the release—sorry, it’s a promo year!—but for now, two more things I want to say: just in case horror isn’t your bag, it might also be useful for you to know that this is the dykiest thing we have ever written, a lesbian love story that we poured everything we wanted into. Secondly, preordering is one of the best ways you can support an author. It shows bookshops (and your publisher) there is interest and excitement in your book, and counts toward your first week of sales. If you’ve ever enjoyed one of these newsletters, if you fancy some gay romance and dyke camp, if you’d like to line up your spooky season read just in time for Halloween, I’d be so grateful. Here’s the preorder link! Now let’s talk fear!
The major problem of writing a horror novel, for me, is that I am a baby who has spent my entire life avoiding the genre. Before and while we wrote FEAST, I embarked on a massive project of reading horror with a magpie eye, to try and work out the beats and techniques of the genre. Of course, we ended up basically doing what we wanted. But during my survey, I read some classics and some weirdos, and found new favourites, first and foremost of which was Mariana Enriquez’s obliterating OUR SHARE OF NIGHT. The novel follows Gaspar from his childhood in 1980s Argentina as he grows up and attempts to uncover the secrets his father—a medium, and the hero-victim of a dangerous cult—left in his memory and his body. It’s a sprawling, sometimes opaque brick of a story, and it plays with pacing in a way that feels distinctly uncomfortable. Sometimes you’re left to dangle for pages and pages, a sleepy roadtrip with dread on the horizon; other times, violence explodes without warning, slicing through you before you have the chance to brace. (Enriquez, incidentally, writes gore more visceral and brutal than any film I’ve watched through my fingers.)
Structure is what I admired most about OUR SHARE OF NIGHT. The long, loose first section feels almost too intently detailed, until you realise you’re entering a perspective shift and Gaspar’s father, Juan, whose every thought you lived within, is now going to be ever-mysterious, just out of reach. Like his kid, I spent so much of the rest of the novel trying to reconstruct the lovely, mean, doomed Juan, trying to understand what he’d be thinking, planning, hoping for based on the one section of thought I had access to. It’s such an effortless trick to tip you into a kid’s shoes, looking up to a parent who is at one so close and so impenetrable.
(translated beautifully into English by Megan McDowell — buy @ bookshop)PAIRS NICELY WITH: A book I had the luck of reading early, Freddie Kölsch’s debut NOW, CONJURERS, which comes out this June. Nesbit and his friends are left reeling after Bastion, the secret witch at the heart of their coven—and Nesbit’s secret boyfriend—is murdered. To get answers, and justice, they have to confront the horror living in the heart of their town: something sly and malicious, with actually terrifying dress sense. Set in 1999, this book has all the violent powerlessness of queer youth brought seething to the surface—there is a confrontation with the police which I think about on dark nights and wish I wouldn’t—but it’s also so charming and clever, full of wordplay that works as actual plot, and features a sneaky, dreamy romance that left me dazed. Let me say simply that there is a Frog & Toad hoodie motif which, at its first appearance, had me sitting upright quivering like a hound catching the scent. Preorder this now and enjoy the summer treat of staying up all night with the goth weirdos of your heart.
(preorder @ bookshop)ALSO CONSIDER: emily m. danforth’s Plain Bad Heroines, another delicious queer brick; the usual oeuvre feat. Stephen King (come talk to me about IT), I’m still not sure anything has scared me as much as The Haunting of Hill House, etc etc; Carmen Maria Machado’s excellently annotated edition of Carmilla; would it be a newsletter from me if I didn’t mention The Once and Future King? anyway, the scene with Mordred behind the door; Motherthing, which Onj & I both devoured and is great for its ghosts but even better for its in-laws; the bit in Fellowship I could only listen to with my face pressed into a sofa cushion.