Browsing by Subject "Horror Fiction"

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    Femme Feral: a novel
    (2024) Beckbessinger, Samantha; Coovadia, Imraan; Beukes, Lauren
    A hyper-competent tech CEO thinks she's going through perimenopause, but there's a different reason for the sudden hairiness and seething rage threatening to destroy everything she's worked for: she's become a werewolf. --- The novel Femme Feral explores what happens when rage is repressed for too long and finally bursts out as wild violence. The story centres on Ellie, a hyper-competent leader in a tech company. Like most 46-yearold women, she is already juggling too much: a job that doesn't appreciate her, the care of her ageing father-in-law, a depressed daughter, and the million other large and small tasks modern middle-class life seems to require. When she finds herself beset by strange physical changes (hair sprouting in new places, trouble sleeping, losing time, finding bloodstains in her clothing, and persistent boiling anger), she attributes everything to perimenopause. She tries solution after solution offered by the booming menopause care industry, but nothing helps. Nearby, a short-tempered older woman named Belinda discovers that her cat has been killed, mutilated, and left on her neighbour's front steps. She swears to find the person responsible. Belinda begins an obsessive investigation across her rapidly gentrifying London neighbourhood and discovers something impossible: a werewolf stalking the city on nights of the full moon. Ellie. Once she realises what's happening to her, Ellie is thrilled by her new lycanthropic powers. She discovers that some problems can be solved with violence. She removes a business rival to take his job as CEO. She savages her daughter's stalker. She scares away catcallers. As she becomes more unapologetic, she gets more of what she wants. Only … Ellie soon realises that the beast within isn't easy to control. With Belinda on her trail and a growing fear of what she's becoming, Ellie has to find a way to yoke her fury before she tears through the people she loves. Femme Feral is a Jekyll-and-Hyde horror story about middle age rage