Jane Flett is a Scottish writer who lives in Berlin. Her fiction has been commissioned for BBC Radio 4, featured in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Highly Commended in the Bridport Prize and she has performed at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. She was a recipient of the Scottish Book Trust New Writer Award.
Freakslaw, a dazzling new queer literary horror about what happens when a travelling funfair of seductive troublemakers arrive in a repressed Scottish town, is her first novel.
This was such a fun debut to read. Can you tell me about how the idea for Freakslaw was originally conceived?
Thank you! Freakslaw arose from a patchwork of obsessions, the way all my stories do. I know some writers sit down with a plot concept in mind, or a character they can’t quit thinking about, but for me it’s always just a big grab bag of all the stuff I’m crushing on at that particular moment, which I then have to mash together into something coherent. For Freakslaw, this list included: small town queers, funfair rides, candyfloss, punk music, pagan sacrifice, neon lights, fortune telling, and the total ache of summer ending.
I’m a big fan of carnivalesque literature, but I have never come across anything that explores these themes through a distinctly Scottish lens. How important do you think the setting of a small Scottish town was for shaping the story?
The longer I’ve lived away from Scotland – I’ve been in Berlin now for 12 years – the more I realise how much Scotland made me into the person I am. So it made perfect sense that the Freakslaw had to visit there. There is a particular Scottish attitude towards suffering I find very interesting, where it’s morally superior to stay in a situation that’s hurting you; a pride in being able to withstand discomfort and resist the allure of the hedonic world. But then you have the carnival, whose whole raison d’être is pleasure in all its myriad forms. And when that is an option people can choose, it can really disrupt the foundational idea that suffering is necessary. Of course, that is going to feel like a threat. As someone who endlessly moves between hedonism and masochism in my own life, that tension is everything to me.
A carnival seems like the perfect metaphor for queerness and chosen family, which are two of the key themes explored in the novel. What drew you to these in your writing?
Community and chosen family make up so much of the fabric of my life, I can’t imagine them not filling the stories I write. Also, I’m a sucker for any love story, and chosen family strikes me as one of the most honest kinds of love there is. You’re not biologically bound, there’s no societal commitment, so when these relationships persevere over a lifetime, it’s because you’re all making the decision to show up for one another, again and again. I want that love to spill into everything I do.
Who are your literary inspirations, from Scotland and beyond?
For this book specifically, I was inspired by Katherine Dunn’s perverted Geek Love, Heather O’Neill’s metaphors in the Lonely Hearts Hotel, and the triumphant horror of The Wickerman.
There’s also a bunch of writers in Scotland at the moment who are writing weird, disgusting, surreal, witchy fiction – Heather Parry, Kirsty Logan, Genevieve Jagger, and Elle Nash to name a few – and I’m so inspired by them.
What is the most valuable piece of advice you’ve been given about writing?
Treasure the time before you have a book published, before you’re forced to interact with the business side of things. Of course, we all want to have a book, but the important thing is the writing, and the space to do that without the expectations and judgement of the external world is its own gift. Personally, I found this advice impossible to take. For so many years, all I wanted was a book, and so much of my time was taken up fretting about when it would be published and how I could make that happen – years and years of worrying, before I’d even finished the words. Now that it’s too late for me, I can tell you: there will come a time when you’re done writing the best version of the book you have to write, and that is the time to think about agents and publishers and everything else. Until then, the sentences are all you’ve got. And they’re the best part anyway.
Have you considered what your next novel might be about?
It’s already written! The novel is about a Scottish tour guide in New Orleans who gets swept up by a glorious band of misfits, as a way of escaping her miserable marriage. Her new friends turn out to be part of a murderous feminist goddess apocalypse cult, and that’s when things get very very weird…
This time, some obsessions are: New Orleans, oysters, hazing rituals, John Waters movies, cannibalism, scurvy, cults (obviously), climate chaos, and all the ways our ego can get us into trouble. If you were a fan of Freakslaw, it’ll be right up your street.
Freakslaw is out now, published with Doubleday (Penguin Random House)
Featured Photo Credit: Makar Artemev
