Heather Parry is a Glasgow-based writer and editor, originally from South Yorkshire, who is drawn to the sinister and stomachturning. Her Frankenstein-esque debut novel, Orpheus Builds a Girl, was shortlisted for the Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year Award. This was followed by This Is My Body, Given For You, a ‘feral’ short story collection with Haunt Publishing. Her first non-fiction book, Electric Dreams: On Sex Robots and the Failed Promises of Capitalism, was released in 2024 as part of 404 Ink’s Inklings series.
Parry’s interests in the insidious are further explored in her newest novel, Carrion Crow, which follows Marguerite Périgord, a young woman locked in the attic of her family home by her mother after the announcement of Marguerite’s engagement to a much older, near-penniless solicitor.
What was the initial inspiration for the novel?
Firstly, I wanted to write something about mother-daughter violence, as I had seen a lot of this happen in various ways (physical, emotional, legal) yet could see no discussion of it.
Second, I wanted to write about Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, the bestselling Victorian tome of domestic instruction, as I had become a little obsessed with it. Then, I read about a woman called Blanche Monnier, also known as la Séquestrée de Poitiers, who was locked in the attic of her family home in France for a similar period of time to Marguerite. The basic facts of her story are so immediately Gothic, and so shocking, that I knew I wanted to write a story that followed a similar trajectory. Carrion Crow is what came out of me – over six weeks in the first lockdown – when I put all those three interests in one place.
Body horror is a significant element of this book, and in your previous fiction. What is it that draws you to this aesthetic?
I don’t really set out to tell these stories via the medium of body horror, but I can’t separate my characters from their bodies, because we can’t separate ourselves from our bodies. When I was a kid I had quite severe eczema, just at the time when I was starting to understand myself as a subject in the world, and having the physical barrier of your body shown to be so vulnerable and corruptible at that sort of age really affects how you look at the body and how it interacts with both your mind and the world around it.
Carrion Crow looks at class, sexual liberty, and bodily autonomy in Edwardian London. Why give the book a historical setting to examine these themes?
Much of this book is twisted around the ‘character’ of the Mrs Beeton book, so it made sense for me to set the story when the book would have been most influential. But I also think the Gothic element of the novel lends itself to that period of history, as Britain was changing so much, and the Empire was at its most murderously successful; the Gothic is always about dying powers and societal shifts.
As readers, we have a lot of knowledge about that period but also a lot of assumptions that are fun to challenge. And also, I have realised I have a massive aversion to setting stories [in the] now because I just don’t want to be writing about mobile phones and the internet if I can really avoid it!
The narrative jumps between two perspectives and timelines, Marguerite being one and her mother, Cécile, the other. Can you tell me about the decision to give voice to both the captive and captor?
I didn’t realise I would be giving Cécile so much page time when I started, but essentially the reason for me writing this book was to ask myself how a character like Cécile, a person who did such terrible things, can come to the place where they are making those choices. I think this makes the horror elements of the book more impactful, because I want to humanise these people, not villainise them.
Similarly, I don’t want my protagonists to be perfect victims, or to have not done terrible things themselves. One of the most difficult things about the world is realising that everyone is just human. None of us are beyond doing monstrous things or hurting others, and it’s quite a humbling process to confront this through writing.
Who were your literary inspirations for the book, from Scotland and beyond?
Jane Eyre, which popularised the very Gothic concept of the ‘madwoman in the attic’, created the foundation on which novels like mine can be built, so you really can’t think about Carrion Crow without thinking about Jane Eyre. But also Patrick Süskind’s brilliant and mad existentialist novella, The Pigeon, was a huge influence on this book. Toni Morrison’s Beloved brought Gothic tropes and the legacy of injustice together in a way that fundamentally changed how I approached writing.
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner really captured me, as of course did Jekyll and Hyde, and latterly the way Alasdair Gray played with Gothic tropes while weaving contemporary social and political critiques in has influenced me a lot, so the Scottish Gothic runs through me on a deep level. Generally, I am very inspired by contemporary Scottish (or Scotlandresident) novelists who I am lucky enough to call friends: Kirsty Logan, Camilla Grudova, Elle Nash, and Martin MacInnes being amongst them.
Your next book is a short story collection, publishing in 2026. Can you tell us more about the project?
It’s a collection which is concerned with the machinery of the modern day – not just machines but also social and interpersonal machinery. Whereas my first short story collection was very intimately concerned with the body as a landscape of narratives, this one looks more at systemic pressures and what our very specific type of modernity is doing to us all. It’s been a lot of fun to write!
Carrion Crow is out now, published by Transworld. Available here.
All photos Robin Christian.
