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That Old Black Magic is the latest crime novel from Cathi Unsworth. This time, Cathi delves into the real-life story of Bella in the Wych Elm, a 1943 murder mystery – and tells us how she created a web of intrigue involving mediums, Ghost Hunters, music hall managers, Suffragettes-turned-Fascists and the corporeal spooks of British Intelligence …

When it comes to writing noir fiction, I have found that the most bizarre characters and plotlines are ones you just couldn’t invent. Which is why my books are based on real cases that have either remained unresolved or contentious to this day. In That Old Black Magic I combine one of each, intertwining stories of witchcraft from the darkest days of World War II, with a cast drawn from reality that even the most imaginative of scribes would be hard-pressed to invent. Mediums, Ghost Hunters, music hall managers, Suffragettes-turned-Fascists and the corporeal spooks of British Intelligence haunt these pages. Please allow me to introduce you to some of them.

I first wrote about Helen Duncan, the Highland-born medium who was the last woman to be prosecuted under the 1735 Witchcraft Act in March 1944, in my last novel Without The Moon. My interest was piqued about this still-controversial case by Tony Robinson’s BBC documentary The Blitz Witch. In the course of research, I discovered two more fascinating characters. Her ally, Hannen Swaffer, was Britain’s most popular and trusted journalist – despite being a self-professed Spiritualist and Socialist, neither of which would gain you much Fleet Street traction now. Her nemesis, Harry Price, was the founder of the National Laboratory for Psychical Research, who investigated the phenomena of mediumship as Spiritualism reached its peak of popularity between the Wars, was a member of the Magic Circle and President of The Ghost Club. While Swaffer, along with scores of distinguished witnesses, testified to Helen’s veracity at The Old Bailey, Price provided the prosecution with photographs of the medium projecting ectoplasm that looked suspiciously similar to cheesecloth.

Price, alongside the remarkable MI5 spymaster Maxwell Knight, weave together my two central stories. Knight ran a circle of agents throughout WWII who infiltrated the many strange, mystic cults with allegiances to the Nazis. His most infamous recruit was the traitor propagandist William Joyce, aka Lord Haw Haw, and his most famous friend the novelist Dennis Wheatley, who also worked in wartime counter-intelligence. In my fiction, Knight assumes the enigmatic form of The Chief. The case that binds them harks back to the April of 1943, when four young boys illicitly foraging in the grounds of Hagley Hall in Worcestershire made a grisly discovery inside a tree. Itself resembling a thing of nightmare, ‘the Wych Elm’, as it was locally known, was acting as coffin for the body of a woman, apparently ritually murdered and hidden there two years previously. Though no one came forward to identify her, graffiti started appearing across the region, asking: WHO PUT BELLA IN THE WYCH ELM? Is she the woman that my fictional detective, Ross Spooner, has been seeking since, on hearing the confession of a German spy captured in the Fens, The Chief sent him to the Midlands to find the elusive Agent Belladonna?

It is certainly the most intriguing mystery I have ever had the fortune to pursue. The many links between spies, Spiritualists, stage magicians and witchcraft covens, coupled with a breathtaking real life backdrop, might at first seem a little far-fetched. But I can promise you that all the weirdest details and strangest characters in this book are those I haven’t made up. And that’s… magic.  

Get your copy of That Old Black Magic with 10% off & free UK p&p

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Ruby Tandoh’s Eat Up!: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want is a rousing love letter to eating and the joy it brings. Inspired by Ruby’s writing, sales, marketing and publicity assistant Jess Harris offers her own recipe for salted caramel brownies.

Eat Up! is out on 1st February.

You’re intimately acquainted with the loose, lost, frustrated feeling of the quiet Sunday afternoon. It’s when you say you’re chilling out, recharging your batteries, even doing that frightful neologism: life admin (because everything, these days, is labour to tick off a to-do list). Instead, you’re slumped on the sofa. You’re idly reassessing your life, thinking of all you’ve done wrong, quietly contemplating jacking it all in and moving away. In severe cases, you even long for the grey busyness of Monday morning so you can forget.

Forget, or be distracted. Mental illnesses, especially anxiety disorders, can make this weariness worse and before you know it your stomach is tying itself into long, tight, loopy knots. But help is at hand in the form of the sunshine-bright, life-affirming manifesto Eat Up! by Ruby Tandoh. It’s a love letter to the role of food in bringing people together, making people better, and spreading happiness. In recent months, Ruby’s writing has led me to detangle my Sunday-night neuroses.

Among her memories of eating, cautions against fad diets and joyful recollections of food in culture, in Eat Up! you will find Ruby’s own recipes, written in the meditative and celebratory language of love. Ruby has her own recipe for ‘More is More Caramel Swirl Brownies’. But, inspired by her, here’s mine.

Melt 200g of butter in a gently-heated saucepan, stirring carefully. Imagine the hard chunks of butter are worries at the back of your mind. I’m not good enough; I’m heading down the wrong path. Let them warm and melt instead. Take it off the heat and add 200g of chocolate (half milk, half dark: pieces of patience and self-compassion), and cover, so they soften together without troubling you.

Pour half a tin of caramel into a bowl and whisk in 200g of golden sugar and four eggs. Enjoy the feeling of working your arms: get the blood moving around your body, get the caramel loosening, and watch the mixture come together under your guidance. Add the now silkily-smooth chocolate and butter and stir until gooey. Think about when you made brownies as a child, getting the mix everywhere. If you want, get the mix everywhere.

Sift in 130g plain flour, 50g of cocoa powder, and a fat pinch of (sea) salt. Smell the melted butter and the chocolate and the caramel as you mix, with the salt a fault line through it all. This is going to be so good: more than that, it’s something good that’s come straight from you, and it’s going to make others happy, too. Think about who else is going to eat them – even if it’s just your colleagues at work tomorrow. Imagine how it’ll feel to see them enjoy them.

Pour half the brownie mixture onto a baking tray and slather half of the caramel over it, along with a generous scattering of sea salt. Top it off with the rest of the mixture, then plenty more caramel. Bake at 180C / gas mark 4, for 25-30 minutes. Lick the bowl, if you want.

When they’re done, the caramel will be firm, but the brownie will wobble. Enjoy that first breath of brownie scent as you pull it from the oven (careful!). Ideally you should wait until it’s cool and hard before you cut it into pieces to eat, but I won’t tell if you dig out a caramel-infused chunk right away and feel its salty sweetness burn your tongue.

The first time I made this anxiety cure, I held my hand on the brownie surface when it was cooling. I was thinking of the warmth it held; the warmth it would give me; the warmth and contentment I felt by bringing it into existence.

You can get your copy of Eat Up! here.

We could go on. Instead we’ll leave you in the capable hands of Serpent’s Tail editor Nick Sheerin, who will take you to purgatory and back, via Dante and Denis Johnson… 

BACK INTO THE BRIGHT WORLD: On the genius of Joy Williams

The characters in Joy Williams’s stories often have the aspect of the damned. In ‘Another Season’, an old caretaker named Nicodemus is tasked with collecting up all the dead animals on an island for disposal. This macabre task, for which (it turns out) he is only theoretically remunerated, is described as a favour but ends up seeming something of a cruel joke. Is this some sort of Sisyphean punishment for a man who came to the island as an old man and whose existence now feels interminable? Is it a coincidence that a 4^th century account of Christ’s descent into hell was attributed to the Nicodemus who appears in John’s Gospel? (I don’t know, but when you’re talking about a writer as exacting as Joy Williams, it is difficult to believe in coincidences.)

This bleakness, this will for her short stories to devastate (something Williams has spoken about in a New York Times interview) is a celebrated part of Williams’s writing. But often, Williams’s stories are not so much a descent into hell as a window on purgatory. In his Comedy, Dante shows us the mixture of grief and hope experienced by penitent souls as they work their way through purgatory to heaven; in Canto XXVI, the great Provençal troubadour Arnaut Daniel, atoning for sins of lust, tells Dante:

With grief, I see my former folly;
with joy, I see the hoped-for day draw near.

In ‘Taking Care’, originally the title story of Williams’s 1982 debut story collection and selected in The Visiting Privilege as the opening story, a pastor named Jones dotes on his granddaughter as his wife dies of cancer. Like many of Williams’ stories, the set-up here is hopeless, and the characters exist in a world where things happen senselessly – your daughter abandons her own daughter to travel to Mexico and have a nervous breakdown; a hunter kills a snowshoe rabbit right in front of you; your wife’s blood fills up with sickness. There is grief aplenty. But where ‘Another Season’ treats Nicodemus with the offhand brutality of a godless world, ‘Taking Care’ is more generous to Jones. Midway through the story, Jones, shortly after taking in his beloved granddaughter, listens for the first time to a record of Kathleen Ferrier singing Mahler:

The music stuns him. Kindertotenlieder. He makes no attempt to seek the words’ translation. The music is enough.

What we are not told is that Kindertotenlieder means ‘Songs on the Death of Children’. Does Jones know this? It’s impossible to tell, but where in other stories Williams might have played this for deadpan humour, here she leaves the awful irony of it half-submerged, allowing Jones his moment of wonder, of hope.

In Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead, another story of a pastor late in life, Reverend John Ames weighs up his past and confronts the present with a kind of stupefied wonder. So too Jones in ‘Taking Care’. But where Ames is granted expiation, Jones is granted only an ambiguously celestial ending:

Jones has readied everything carefully for his wife’s homecoming. The house is clean and orderly. For days he has restricted himself to only one part of the house to ensure that his clutter will be minimal. Jones helps his wife up the steps to the door. Together they enter the shining rooms.

What’s going on here? Is this simply a description of the clean rooms? Of course not. Is it an ascent to paradise? Perhaps not so much as that, but at least the recognition that there could be something beyond this purgatory.

At the beginning of Denis Johnson’s debut novel Angels, Jamie arrives in Chicago with her two children and no money; relying on the kindness of strangers, she is raped. She takes up with Bill, a bankrobber who is later sentenced to death for shooting a security guard. Jamie’s children are taken away from her. Bill goes to the gas chamber. But in spite of everything that happens – and Angels is, on a temporal level, relentlessly bleak – there’s a sense of hope in all this, of Jamie and Bill moving towards the light of purgatory. As Bill awaits his trial, he experiences a kind of epiphany:

And then abruptly but very gently something happened, and it was Now. The moment broke apart and he saw its face. [This] was a world he might be lifted out of by a wind, but never by anything evil or thoughtless or without meaning. It was a world he could go to the gas chamber in, and die forever and never die.

For some writers, this is glimpse into the heart of things is the only solace they can give their characters. Bill must go to his execution; Jamie must go mad. Arnaut Daniel must spend a thousand years singing and weeping. Jones must watch his wife as she dies. In Williams, as in Johnson and Dante, there is only a dim light at the end of a narrow road, and not everyone finds the way out. But the light shines, just about.

Find out more about The Visiting Privilege (and buy your copy with 10% off + free UK p&p)
Follow @nicksheerin on Twitter 

‘How to tell the story of a 500-page collection of stories spanning more than forty years? Especially when I really want to just exclaim, “Oh, Oh, OH!” in a state of steadily mounting rapture’ Geoff Dyer, Observer

‘Perhaps the greatest living master of the short story’ Neel Mukherjee

Meet the modern master of the short story: Joy Williams. Williams’ uniquely devastating portrayals of modern life have been captivating readers and writers for decades and earned her comparisons to John Cheever, Raymond Carver and Flannery O’Connor. Here, for the first time, Williams’ thirty-three best stories are available in a single volume, together with thirteen new stories that show a writer continuing to mould the form into something strange and new. 

Click to read the short story ‘Another Season’ below or download a PDF.

Bleak but funny, real but surreal, domestic but dangerous, familiar but enigmatic, Joy Williams’ stories fray away the fabric at the edge of ordinary experience to reveal the loneliness at the heart of human life.

In ‘The Lover’, a girl suffers a spiritual and physical wasting away; in ‘The Visiting Privilege’, a visitor finds refuge in her friend’s psychiatric ward; in ‘Charity’, a woman gives a poor family gas money and finds herself marooned in their peculiar world; in ‘Another Season’ an itinerant man cleanses an island of roadkill; in ‘Craving’ an alcoholic couple head towards a car crash.

The Visiting Privilege represents the culmination of Williams’ career and cements her place as the most singular artist of short fiction writing today.

The Visiting Privilege is out on 2nd November. Pre-order your copy here

We’re over the moon to announce that we’ve acquired Melmoth: the new novel from Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent.

Inspired by Charles Maturin’s forgotten gothic masterpiece Melmoth the Wanderer, Melmoth begins in the present day, and takes its ensemble cast of characters on a spectacular journey through time. Dazzlingly inventive, terrifying and beautiful, it will make readers think deeply about the human capacity for good and evil and how often the two are intertwined. This is a novel that transcends easy categorisations of gothic or literary fiction to speak urgently to our time.

Publisher Hannah Westland says: ‘I never doubted that Sarah’s next book would be even more ambitious and impressive than The Essex Serpent. Because Sarah is a writer of such original talent, intellect and energy, the question was never how good the book would be, but what shape it might take. It is impossible to describe just how breathtaking, moving and haunting Melmoth is. I have never read anything quite like it, and we can’t wait to publish next year.’

Sarah Perry says: ‘Both my wonderful agent Jenny Hewson and Hannah Westland at Serpent’s Tail understood exactly what I wanted to achieve and met this book with more love and enthusiasm than I’d dared hope. So I’m thrilled to be working again with Hannah and my friends at Serpent’s Tail: they’ve been my home since the beginning and I know Melmoth couldn’t be in better hands.’

Hannah Westland acquired UK and Commonwealth rights excluding Canada with exclusive Europe from Jenny Hewson at Rogers, Coleridge & White. Serpent’s Tail will publish in autumn 2018.

Sarah Perry’s second novel The Essex Serpent (2016) has sold 450,000 copies across all Serpent’s Tail editions and was a number one bestseller.

It was the Waterstones Book of the Year 2016 and won British Book Awards for Fiction Book of the Year, Book of the Year and Publicity Campaign of the Year, as well as the BAMB Beautiful Book Award. It was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award, International Dylan Thomas and RSL Encore prizes and longlisted for the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Wellcome and the Walter Scott prizes.

RCW have sold rights to The Essex Serpent in 20 territories so far. Television rights were bought by See Saw Films (Love, Nina, Top of the Lake) and a dramatisation is currently in development.

Tell us how excited you are on Twitter, Facebook & Instagram

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André Alexis was born in Trinidad and grew up in Canada. His debut novel, Childhood, won the Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Trillium Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. His previous books include Asylum, Beauty and Sadness, Ingrid & the Wolf, and Pastoral, which was also nominated for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Fifteen Dogs, which we published in 2015, won the 2016 Giller Prize, and The Hidden Keys was published in 2017.

His editor Rebecca Grays asks him the pressing questions about The Hidden Keys, for our August newsletter.

Rebecca Gray: This book is one of five novels you’re writing as a single project – could you explain what that project is, and what inspired you to embark on it?

André Alexis: The five novels I’m writing came to me after years of trying – and failing – to do my own version of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema, a movie that fascinated me. What fascinated was not the erotic geometry (the “theorem”) but the idea of the influence of the divine. Once I’d stripped the movie down to that idea, a number of scenarios came to me at once. And The Hidden Keys is one of them. The Hidden Keys is the most unusual of the variations because it’s a story in which no god directly appears. God is a kind of absence, but the idea of chance or fate steps in to fill the place of the divine. The Hidden Keys is a story in which chance is omnipresent and omnipotent, almost to the point of being worthy of worship.

RG: On one level, this book is quite a traditional puzzle. Did you find that using Treasure Island as inspiration made the puzzle and plot aspect of the book easier, or more difficult? Did you have a path to follow, and what happened if and when you needed to diverge from it?

AA: I’m more of a “literary” novelist – more often concerned with theme, concision, characterization and psychology. So, the puzzle/plot aspect of The Hidden Keys was sometimes excruciating – throw-yourself-down-the-stairs-so-you-never-have-to-write-again excruciating. My first draft was a long-ish working out of the plot. It was only with the second draft that I could relax and work on the things that come more easily to me: theme, characterization, etc. But if the first draft was tough, each subsequent draft was easier and more amusing. So much so that, of the novels I’ve written, I sometimes have the fondest memory of The Hidden Keys.

RG: How consciously have you made Toronto a key element of both The Hidden Keys and Fifteen Dogs?

AA: Very consciously. In fact, one of the guiding ideas – while I was writing the novel – was the question: if you could never see Toronto again, what about the city would stay with you? In Fifteen Dogs, Toronto was like a “territory”, an environment the dogs experience sensually and mark off, claim for themselves. In The Hidden Keys, Toronto is a place in the mind – intensely felt, intensely held. Though all five of the novels I’m writing are related, The Hidden Keys and Fifteen Dogs are sister novels.

RG: What inspired the famously impregnable building in the book?

AA: The Hidden Keys was principally inspired by Pasolini’s Teorema and Treasure Island, it’s true. But it was also inspired by stories of quests for the holy grail. I read Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance while I was writing Hidden Keys. So, some of the stranger elements in the novel come from grail mythology. The “impregnable building” – or Castle Rose – was my way of alluding to the hidden castle, the place in grail mythology that is can’t be found, except of course by a pure knight.

RG: I have worked with enough authors to know that writing any novel is difficult, but is it particularly, or specifically, challenging to write a novel that is both plot-driven and philosophical?

AA: As I mentioned, it was difficult for me, as a philosophically-minded writer, to write with a fairly strict plot. But, in the end, the structure came first, then came the philosophical elements. So, the structural problems had been resolved – more or less – by the time thematic ones reared their heads. I’d love to know if this is how John Grisham works. (This question reminds me of the one we ask songwriters: do words come first or does the music?)

RG: What’s particularly stayed with me is how the structure and form of Fifteen Dogs and The Hidden Keys manage to be both strange and familiar. Was that something you consciously wanted to achieve?

AA: Yes, very much so. I sometimes think the dance done by the familiar and the strange is my only real subject.

RG: Both Fifteen Dogs and The Hidden Keys are very short, yet contain so much. What’s your editorial process? Do you write very long and then condense, or are you concise by nature?

AA: I’m concise by nature, but also by inclination. I usually have to add, rather than subtract, to finish a work. This has to do with my close friends, who tend to be poets or playwrights. One of them, Roo Borson, is a great poet and I love talking to her about poetry. But at times, I feel like such a windbag when I write.

RG: It’s probably a horrendous question, but what do you want the five novels to say when they’re all put together?

AA: I’d like to think of them as a prolonged invitation to think about place, love, power, and the nature of the divine. My ideal would be that the reader finishes The Quincunx – my name for all five novels – with a heightened sense of the mysterious, the in-between, and the delicacy (and power) of certain ideas. Beyond all that, there is a portrait of the country I live in, Canada. I love it deeply and find it deeply weird. The Quincunx is a kind of testimony to how Canada lives in the mind. Or in one mind, anyway.

Intrigued? Read an extract from The Hidden Keys, which is out now.

Follow @rebecca_gray_ on Twitter

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Our sumptuous complete edition of Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet is out now. Here are ten things you might not know about Portugal’s greatest writer.

1. 1. Fernando Pessoa was born in Lisbon in 1888, and died there in 1935.

2. 2. Between the ages of seven and seventeen, Pessoa lived with his mother and step-father (the Portuguese Consul to South Africa) in Durban, where he rapidly became fluent in both English and French. Many of the marginal notes Pessoa made to his manuscripts of The Book of Disquiet are written in English.

3. 3. Most of his writing was not published during his lifetime. The Book of Disquiet first came out in Portugal in 1982.

4. 4. Pessoa was a true polymath: a poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher.

5. 5. Pessoa wrote under as many as 136 different aliases, which he called ‘heteronyms’. He preferred this term to ‘pseudonym’, arguing that his heteronyms were more than that and describing them as ‘beings with a life of their own, with feelings I do not have, and opinions I do not accept.’

6. 6. A bronze statue of Pessoa sits outside the Café a Brasileira in Lisbon – perhaps Pessoa’s second favourite café –  where he would smoke, read and write, and where the short-lived but influential literary magazine Orpheu was founded by Pessoa and others.

7. 7. The Book of Disquiet is Pessoa’s ‘factless autobiography’; a mosaic of dreams, hope, despair, aphorisms and ruminations, narrated by two of Pessoa’s heteronyms: the pre-1930 Vicente Guedes and the post-1930 assistant bookkeeper, Bernardo Soares.

8. 8. Our new edition is most complete edition available, and the only one where the texts are arranged in the order in which Pessoa actually wrote them.

9. 9. There’s a huge and dedicated world of Pessoa fans out there. This year, Half Pint Press created a limited run of 80 handmade ‘Boxes of Disquiet’: a collection Pessoa quotes typeset and printed by hand on a selection of everyday paraphernalia.

10. 10. Pessoa developed a fascination with the English occultist Aleister Crowley. The unlikely pair met in 1930 in Lisbon, where Crowley enlisted Pessoa’s help in faking his own suicide.

Find out more & buy The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition

Join our #DayofDisquiet on Twitter

I Love Dick has taken the world of literature, and now television, by storm once again, twenty years after its initial publication in 1997, thanks to its wry, hilarious voice, radical dissection of what it means to operate as a man and a woman, honest and wry look at the art world, unforgettable one-liners, pioneering genre-bending… The list goes on.

No wonder reading groups are desperate to discuss it. We’ve put together ten questions which we hope will help get a fascinating discussion underway. 

Tell us if your book group is reading I Love Dick & tag us in your pics!

Twitter @serpentstail Instagram @serpentstail Facebook @serpentstailbooks  #ILoveDick

I Love Dick by Chris Kraus: Reading group questions

1. Why does Chris start writing to Dick? Why does she keep writing to him?

2. How do you see Chris and Sylvere’s relationship change throughout the novel?

3. What is the role of the writers, artists and critics that Chris refers to throughout I Love Dick in our understanding of the events of the novel?

4. After her night with Dick, Chris quotes from Simone Weil’s Gravity & Grace: ‘It is impossible to forgive whoever has done us harm if that harm has lowered us. We have to think that it has not lowered us but revealed to us our true level.’ Can Chris forgive Dick?

5. Chris writes about the artist Hannah Wilke, the prejudices she is subjected to as a woman in the art world – and what she does to subvert them. How do you think I Love Dick responds to or challenges this?

6. Chris says, ‘Art, like God or The People, is fine for as long as you can believe in it.’ How does this system of belief manifest itself in the novel?

7. ‘There isn’t much I take seriously and since I’m frivolous and female most people think I’m pretty dumb. They don’t realize I’m a kike.’ How does Chris present the differences between her intellectual project on the one hand and Sylvère’s and Dick’s on the other?

8. What are the ramifications of the novel’s ending for the narrator’s project in I Love Dick?

9. I Love Dick has been called a ‘confessional’ novel. Chris Kraus has argued against this, saying ‘this writing was very physical, and I was terribly shocked when it was widely perceived at face value, as a cheap confession.’ Do you feel her writing is universal? Or ‘confessional’ – or both? Have you read any other books you’d call ‘confessional’?

10. I Love Dick was written in 1997, but has recently resurfaced and found a new and widespread readership. In 2017 an Amazon Prime TV series was released based on the book. Why do you think this resurgence might be happening now?

Download the questions as a PDF

Is it the end of the world as we know it? With increased sales of The Handmaid’s Tale and 1984, it looks like we’re turning to literature to help make sense of the mad situation. But when you’re hunkered down in your nuclear bunker, two books aren’t going to cut it: here’s an ultimate post-apocalyptic reading list brought to you by editor Nick Sheerin.

In David Gates’s novel Jernigan, Peter Jernigan is busy wisecracking and drinking his way towards personal Armageddon. Jernigan’s girlfriend Martha, though, is better prepared for the end of the world than she is for Jernigan’s self-destructive streak: she breeds rabbits in the basement and takes tips from Suburban Survivalist. Survivalism has been an American past-time for decades: think of Ted Kaczynski abandoning what he saw as an increasingly dystopian society for the call of the wild, or the many Americans who built domestic fallout shelters in their back gardens. More recently, Britain has seen a huge increase in demand from British ‘preppers’ for survivalist products. But writers have been preparing for the apocalypse for years. If we know anything about what the end of the world might look like, it’s thanks to writers like Cormac McCarthy, Nevil Shute and J.G. Ballard.

The modern post-apocalyptic survival thriller

Heinz Helle’s Euphoria follows five friends as they struggle to make sense of their freshly devastated world. Gruber, Drygalski, Fürst, Golde and the unnamed narrator have spent a few days together in an isolated cabin, a typical lads’ retreat from the realities of mid-thirties life. When they come down from the cabin, they find what looks like the charred aftermath of war, or some other kind of near-instant collapse of society in their immediate vicinity.

Like McCarthy, Helle is less concerned with what happened to the world than what happens to the people left. In this sense, Euphoria, like The Road, has elements of the modern post-apocalyptic survival thriller whose most common incarnation is now found in zombie movies, video games and novels. In the long-running Resident Evil series of video games, the player takes on hordes of zombies while trying to stop the viral outbreak that has created them. The protagonist as the lone hope for humanity is the standard at the pulpier end of the post-apocalyptic survival thriller genre (see the film adaptions of I Am Legend, Max Brooks’s World War Z, and PD James’s The Children of Men).

Do no evil

At the more literary end of the spectrum, though, there is rarely any hope of returning the world to its pre-apocalyptic state. Helle’s five young men wander the ruined landscape of Euphoria and attempt merely to survive. McCarthy’s The Road ultimately offers a sliver of hope, having offered exactly its opposite for most of its course – hope not of a return to normality, but that humanity can survive in the face of brutality.

Helle’s vision of human nature is perhaps darker. Is there a place for humanity when we are reduced to animal survival? In common with much of McCarthy’s work, the world of The Road is divided between people who do evil and people to whom evil is done. In the murderous character of Judge Holden, McCarthy’s equally apocalyptic western Blood Meridian features one of the most purely evil characters in fiction. In Heinz Helle’s fictional world, meanwhile, evil is not so much an essence as a habit. In Helle’s previous novel, Superabundance, the narrator was a young man struggling with bad impulses, cheating on his girlfriend in spite of himself. Euphoria’s five young men are in much worse circumstances – and so they do much worse too.

But Euphoria, as with most post-apocalyptic novels, is as much about the world before as the world afterward. As they make their way through the pointless ruins of their world, the narrator takes longer and longer to make sense of what he sees:

In the distance, at the head of this endless line of stationary vehicles, something emerges from the fog: something compact, thick, chaotic. A big pile. Or a small mountain. We draw nearer. A multicoloured mountain. We draw nearer still. A multicoloured mountain of metal. We draw even nearer.

The image slowly coalesces:

Crushed cars, overturned cars, cars that have been pressed together, wedged together, bumpers tangled in wheel wells, bumpers tangled in engine bonnets, in dented driver’s side doors, in severely dented passenger side doors, bumpers in bumpers in twisted boot lids upon torn-off car doors and on top of that rusty undercarriages, exhaust systems, wheels thrusting skyward and cracks, fissures and rifts in the crimson red, racing green, pearl white or obsidian black or in cheaper colours without trademarked names, dirty wounds that reveal that even the most dynamic SUV is really nothing more than a hunk of metal driven by fire.

Pieces of broken safety glass everywhere, astonishingly evenly distributed, like sharp, bright-sounding snow. The mind’s childish hope that staring for longer will offer answers.

A whole new world

The world these men find themselves is no longer the world of just a few weeks earlier. The things that had meaning before are reduced to disembodied lists of objects. Cars become ‘hunks of metal driven by fire’. In an earlier scene, the five men realise that for days they have been carrying around their lifeless smartphones in their jeans pockets. They throw them into a lake filled with animal carcasses. Their world is gone, and with it something of themselves.

This is where some of the best post-apocalyptic writing finds its subject: what we stand to lose in the face of environmental catastrophe, war, zombie invasion, whatever means we find to destroy ourselves – and what we want to preserve of this world. Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven follows a wandering theatre troupe as they attempt to preserve the thing most precious to them. In The Chinese Room’s recent video game Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, the player explores the fictional Shropshire village of Yaughton in the aftermath of a mysterious catastrophe in which all the villagers have ‘gone to the rapture’. This lovingly imagined town – part Ambridge, part Twin Peaks, allows the player to wander through a lost world and uncover the small dramas at the heart of life in an English village in the 1980s. Denis Johnson’s novel Fiskadoro shows us an irradiated Florida Keys where cults and myths have flowered in the aftermath of a nuclear war, and where people cling to what they’ve salvaged of the world that went before.

Euphoria’s characters find nothing to preserve of the material world, or even the world of ideas. Helle –  like Johnson, The Chinese Room and Mandel – finds the essence of our humanity not in the individual human animal, but in the safety net of human society, and the means it affords us to do more than just survive: the collapse of society is the collapse of humanity.

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We could not be happier that The Essex Serpent, Sarah Perry’s Gothic masterpiece of friendship, science and religion, is Waterstones Book of the Year 2016. Here, watch Sarah discuss the book and answer some of the questions she gets most frequently from readers.

You can buy the book yourself – and get lost in the mysterious Essex marshes – here.

Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica is our latest Classic. Shortlisted for the National Book Award when it came out in 2005, the novel explores the thrilling and alienating sides of glamour. Marketing manager Flora Willis sees parallels in the attitudes to beauty explored in the novel and our relationship with social media today.

It’s a prickly feeling you get while reading Veronica. An uncomfortable feeling, like someone is watching you. A sense that someone is appraising someone, more often than not.

You shut the book and go online. Scrolling through your social media, you see friends in nice clothes at sparkling parties, cakes with pastel icing, babies laid on 100% pure Scandinavian wool diamond weave blankets. Young models lounge in bra tops and older actresses flaunt wrinkle-free skin, gripping a make-up stick like a knife in their hand. You consider uploading a photo of yourself but only after you’ve edited it using the beautification app your younger sister told you about. You glance over at the cover of Veronica. The girl on the cover is bent over, doing up her strappy silver sandal that she wears over glittery tights. You think, I could never pull off that outfit.

Dualities pervade Veronica: beautiful and ugly, success and failure, us and them. Written in 1992 and set in the 1980s, Alison’s story starts with a fairytale told to her by her mother: a beautiful girl is banished to an underworld of ‘demons and deformed creatures’ as punishment for being cruel. It’s supposed to be a warning, but in her mother’s voice, Alison hears ‘a girl who wants to be too beautiful but also the mother who wants to love her, and the demon who wants to torture her’. The warnings fall away; all that remains is the lure of too-beautiful.

The story skips forward to the present day. Middle-aged and ill, Alison looks back on herself when she was a beautiful, rebellious teenager. A girl who, as Gaitskill writes of her younger self in her introduction, ‘wanted beauty, not merely physical beauty, but the heightened pitch of existence the magazines hinted at.’ The same existence shown to us when we go online and see models, cakes, pure wool blankets.

Spurred on by her mother’s bitterness (‘She thinks being pretty will make her way’), teenage Alison runs away from home, soon moving to Paris to model, where she lives a feverish existence of parties, sex, cruelty, viewed through beauty-tinted spectacles. On a shoot, a young model called Lisa is humiliated but to Alison ‘Her face was ravaged and fevered, but she was erect … She looked amazing.’ In a nightclub, ‘People’s faces look like masks with snouts and beaks. But I knew they were beautiful.’

This high is short-lived. Alison’s agent cons her out of all her earnings, forcing her to return home, where she is bored and depressed – and cruel. Sharing a bed with her sister, she thinks, ‘I wanted her to know that she was a dog, ugly and poor. I wanted all of them to know.’ Us and them. Her head is full of memories of Paris, the nightclubs and the characters she knew there. She describes to her sister the sight of Lisa in an S&M club – but ‘Lisa was not looking at me.’ And now her sister: ‘She was not looking at me either.’ What’s the point if no one is looking at you? So Alison moves to New York City, even if it means temping in an office.

Is she lost to superficiality? Almost. Then, she meets Veronica.

Veronica is twenty years older than Alison. She represents a duality of ‘elegance and ugliness together’ that at once attracts and repels Alison. Veronica has been the pretty girl; now she is plump, tasteless, old-fashioned. But her honesty is addictive. This line resonates with Alison (and today’s Tumblr community):

‘Prettiness is always about pleasing people. When you stop being pretty, you don’t have to do that anymore. I don’t have to do that anymore. It’s my show now.’

And off she struts ‘like a movie star’. Alison is stunned by Veronica’s ownership of all that is ugly in her life. Later, when Veronica is dying from AIDS, Alison can only make sense of her plight by comparing it to a dramatic rock song, ‘dramatic and a little dark’. It’s a hollow offering to a dying woman – ‘This isn’t a rock song, hon’ – the ‘realest’ person Alison knows.

Now, the same age as Veronica when she died, with hepatitis gnawing painfully at her own body, Alison utters her own version of Veronica’s words: ‘I don’t have to do that anymore. It’s nobody’s show now.’ Alison can only align ugliness with failure. If nobody’s watching, does she even exist? In her introduction, Gaitskill refers to ‘the social clothing with which we dress our raw unknowable selves, searching for a form that will be recognized and understood by others, that can move in this world, love and be loved.’The photos we upload. The filters we put on them. Who are we putting those pictures out there for, and what are we sacrificing when we do it? Whose show do we think it is, exactly?

But Alison is feeling her way towards understanding, slowly, like she’s using her fingertips in the dark. ‘If we were a story, Veronica and I would be about a bedraggled prostitute taking refuge in the kitchen with the kindly old cook… They are part of the scene and they add to it. But they are not the story.’ Nobody’s show. If not redemption, then acceptance. Acceptance of ugliness, but no longer a struggle for beauty. Of failure, but no longer a struggle for success. To Alison, she and Veronica made each other human: and she is happy to become ‘one of them.’

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Our designer Steve Panton shares his thoughts on the new Serpent’s Tail Classic repackage of Kanzaburo Oe’s masterpiece The Silent Cry.

The covers below are both the final cover (‘O’) and four unused concepts. The final cover depicts the main character, Mitsusaburo, a Japanese businessman, surrounded by plant life upon his return to his family home in a remote forested valley on Shikoku, in the south of Japan. The contrast of urban and rural within this photograph is a theme that runs through the novel.

In the novel, the forest is not only an integral location but can be viewed as a character itself. Because of this, I focused the majority of my other visuals on obscure close-ups of trees and plant life.

Following the style of covers across our Classics series,  I chose a single stand-out colour – in this case, red. I chose it not only for its links to Japan (e.g. the red circle on the country’s flag) but also to reflect the violence within the book. In one memorable scene, a man commits suicide after painting his head red.

Whilst I am really fond of my other concepts, the strongest design won. Not only is it striking but it is unsettling, surreal and compliments the themes of the book.

Let us know what you think at @serpentstail and Facebook.com/serpentstailbooks

www.stevepanton.com

@stevepanton

Excitement for Vivienne Westwood’s new collection of diaries has been ramping up at Serpent’s Tail HQ since Vivienne’s editor, Mark Ellingham, bought them last year – so you can only imagine the level of anticipation now we’re three weeks away from publication.

They’re everything we’d hoped for. Honest, enlightening, funny and impassioned, Get a Life treats us to a backstage tour of Vivienne’s life: from past fashion shows and the philosophies behind them, the imperatives behind her environmental movement, Climate Revolution, to her love for literature and art, to elaborate fashion parties in far-flung countries.

We’ve published Get a Life as a beautiful hardback with bright orange cloth binding. Inside, diary entries are illustrated with Vivienne’s own sketches and handwritten notes, plus beautiful photos from fashion shows, fabrics, photoshoots as well as images of Vivienne’s cultural inspirations.

It’ll make a beautiful present for anyone who loves Vivienne, who is interested in climate change campaigns and what it’s really like to run a top fashion company.

Here’s a taste of what’s inside:

WEDS 21 DEC

IT’S THE WEEK BEFORE CHRISTMAS …

We’ve been very busy in these last days before the Christmas break: putting together the Gold Label collection and moving ahead with Cool Earth fundraising work. The campaign has really been gathering momentum since its launch at the end of November. As well as raising money, raising public awareness of the urgent need to save the rainforest is really important if we want to achieve our goals. Our friend, Daniel Lismore, hosted a party at Whisky Mist in London – I think we were all amazed at how much money was raised and how many people wrote us letters of support.
This morning I did a photo shoot and interview on climate change for the March issue of Harper’s Bazaar with models from the Storm agency – we are so grateful for all the help and on-going support Storm are giving us with our project. I was also really pleased to spend time with the models: Lily Donaldson, Poppy Delevingne, Jacquetta Wheeler, Sadie Frost, Paul Sculfor and Max Rogers. I knew Jacquetta and Sadie already; they all looked wonderful but I was impressed by how interested they are in our work and how willing they all are to help us.
On Thursday, we’re off to a meeting at the prime minister’s office to talk about the rainforest and climate change.

Join in, become a GAL and #GETALIFE! We’re tweeting @serpentstail, Facebooking @serpentstailbooks and Instagramming  @serpentstail

Originally published in our August newsletter

You may have already read Eileen Myles’ work. You may have heard Lena Dunham raving about their poetry. You may have spotted their cameo appearance or recognised the poet character based on them in Transparent. Either way, ‘New York City’s revered queer punk poet’ has probably shown up in your life one way or another. They have, after all, been on the literary scene since the 1970s, and been called the ‘rock star of modern poetry’ and  ‘one of the savviest and most restless intellects in contemporary literature’.

As if that isn’t enough to take in, Eileen Myles has also run for president – and all these other things, too.

1. Eileen Myles has worked on the Emmy-award winning Amazon series Transparent, acting as a consultant as the show created a character based on them. (The character is played by the veteran Broadway actress Cherry Jones, pictured below.)

2. Their next book is about a time-travelling dog – it’s a memoir, but not as we know it. 

3. They tried to write porn for money, being offered $200 per week. ‘I got as far as, “I’ll be there tomorrow,” and then I thought, “I will feel mentally ill if I do this.”

4. They ran as an ‘openly female’ candidate for US President in 1992, against George Bush. Their original mailing list comprised 400 people.

5. Eileen supports Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, saying:

“I just want to see a woman sit in the White House once before this empire falls down. And if a woman brings it down, I think that would be cool. I hope she blows it up.”

6. They were awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012 for General Non-Fiction. 

7. They toured the country as part of the lesbian, feminist spoken-word/performance-art group Sister Spit.

8. Eileen Myles and Jill Soloway have written a radical feminist manifesto after coming to the conclusion that the porn industry “distributes portrayals of almost exclusively male pleasure and climax’. The manifesto includes a list of demands and one of those demands is that porn made by men be “outlawed for one hundred years.” They also called for a 50-year ban on men creating art such as film, television, poetry, and writing.

topplethepatriarchy.com/

 9. They have worked in a factory job in Maine where “The men were all men, and we were all lesbians, and everyone loved to get smashed.”

10. They used to live four floors below Blondie. “I got to New York and there was a band on the fourth floor in my building. And it was Blondie. I started to understand that the people who said they were doing things were actually doing these things now and they were good and they either were culturally important or they would be.”

11. Eileen asks their nephew to call them ‘Uncle Eileen’.

12. They get stopped at airports and asked if they have a penis because of a ‘groin anomaly’ on T.S.A scans.

… and breathe.

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If you’re anything like us/the rest of the world, you’ve been enthralled by Simone Biles’ impeccable gymnastics performances at the Rio Olympics. You might also remember the first gymnast ever to score a perfect 10 at the Olympics, Nadia Comaneci. Lola Lafon’s novel imagines the childhood of Comaneci, from Communist Romania, who became a political symbol of the Cold War. Scroll down to read the first chapter and to watch Comaneci’s perfect 10.

The Montreal Olympics, 1976. A fourteen-year-old girl steps out onto the floor of the Montreal Forum and into history.

Twenty seconds on the uneven bars is it all it takes for Nadia Comaneci, the slight, unsmiling child from Communist Romania, to etch herself into the collective memory. The judges award her an unprecedented perfect ten, the first in Olympic gymnastics.

In The Little Communist Who Never Smiled, Lola Lafon weaves an intricate web of truth and fiction around Comaneci’s life, from her discovery by legendary gymnastics coach Béla Károlyi up to her defection to the United States in 1989.

Adored by young girls in the West and appropriated as a political emblem by the Ceausescu regime, Comaneci was a fearless, fiercely determined child whose body would become a battleground in the Cold War story of East against West. Lafon’s novel is a powerful re-imagining of a childhood in the spotlight of history, politics and destiny.

Read the first chapter below:

Watch the moment Nadia Comaneci scored her perfect 10 at the Montreal Olympics, 1976.

@lafonlola

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