Community, Salvation and Queer Joy: A Guest Post by Jane Flett
With worm charmers, contortionist witches, conjoined twins and more, all with an unwavering thirst for revenge, this traveling carnival is unlike any other. Read on for an exclusive essay from Jane Flett on writing her debut novel, Freakslaw.
Hardcover $28.00
Freakslaw
Freakslaw
By Jane Flett
In Stock Online
Hardcover $28.00
In this riotous horror debut, a traveling carnival of troublemakers arrive in a small Scottish town and perform their favorite pastime: revenge.
In this riotous horror debut, a traveling carnival of troublemakers arrive in a small Scottish town and perform their favorite pastime: revenge.
The first version of Freakslaw was a chaotic mess. By the time I decided to write a novel, I’d already spent years publishing short stories, and was sure I knew what I was doing. A novel would make the perfect container into which to funnel my obsessions—carnivals, punk music, witchcraft, pagan rituals, kink, continental philosophy, tarot, and all the rest.
I drafted the manuscript in a frenzy over the period of a year and showed it to a couple of people whose opinions I cherish. A first novel feels like peeling open all the secret compartments of your brain, inviting the world to peer inside. There’s a heady vulnerability in that moment—oh god, what are they going to find in there?—but I was also so, so proud of myself that I’d actually written a book.
But I had not, in fact, written a book. The feedback was brutal but necessary: nice sentences, Jane, but you seem to have forgotten about a plot. They were right. What I had was a bunch of character sketches and far too many metaphors. If it was ever to become anything, I’d have to start the whole thing again.
This was 2016. The UK and US had entered a politically cursed timeline, and I’d spent the summer sick in bed after catching Lyme’s disease. My brain was sluggish, the thought of digging into the required work impossible. So I put the manuscript aside.
Still, the Freakslaw wouldn’t go away. There was a part of me all twisted up with fairground rides and cotton candy, who missed my characters (Nancy especially) and wanted to know what they’d get up to if I gave them the chance. Each May in Berlin, the fair returned, and I’d cycle through the park in that first glorious pulse of summer—when all the trees suddenly smell like life again—and I’d let the neon strobe across my face, feeling a wild excitement that anything could be about to happen.
And so, a few years later, I tried again. When I came back to the page, I could see what was missing. The carnival had always been clear to me, but the wider world of the novel had been a nebulous space, a nothing to push against. By this point, I’d been living in Berlin for six years—my own queer weirdo bubble—and I’d had the distance to figure out some of my feelings about where I’d come from.
This book was about Scotland. About small towns and trying to escape. And when I started writing it again from the beginning, this time it made sense. There was a story I had to tell about what it means to be both shaped by somewhere and yet need nothing more than to get away. About the particular hostilities a place can hold for its wayward daughters—but also about community, salvation and queer joy. How these opposing forces exist in our hearts at the same time, and how they make us who we are.
Freakslaw is the result. I hope you enjoy.