Dead Animals, a novel exploring the boundaries of female rage

A woman wakes up after a party covered in bruises. She has scratches on the soft undersides of her arms and her lip is swollen. She can’t remember what happened. There was a man. She can’t remember if she asked the man to hit her. “If you did ask, you must not have asked for it to be that hard,” the unnamed narrator thinks in the opening pages of Phoebe Stuckes’ debut novel, Dead Animals. “No one would ask for that.” She takes photos of her injuries and leaves the guy’s flat. “It’s like you’ve survived a horror,” she thinks later, “it’s as if you’ve crawled through the woods”. Several weeks later, a memory comes back: “I said no.”

Dead Animals is a novel about trauma and sexual violence. Yet, in the same way Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You exceeded the bounds of the term ‘post-MeToo narrative’, Stuckes’ book is generically slippery and hard to pin down. Dead Animals is as much a novel about hospitality work, disaffection, privilege, the rental market, and supernatural hauntings as it is about sexual trauma. Or perhaps it is all of these things bound together that make it such a powerfully compelling work of queer horror.

Floating between her waitressing job and ad-hoc catering jobs, the narrator feels herself disappearing. Until, that is, in the midst of a panic attack at another party, she meets Helene, a beautiful, wealthy girl who happens to have her own traumatic history with the guy from the party. They’re drawn to each other, but their intimate relationship feels increasingly menacing. Oh, and the electricity keeps failing, things keep breaking, and all the machines at the laundrette start running all at once. Mould blooms in the narrator’s bedsit, looking uncannily like a face. Is she haunted? Possessed? And what are Helene’s real intentions? Is she serious when she says the best way to deal with the guy from the party is to kill him?

A couple of days before the book’s release, I meet Stuckes in a café in southeast London. A former Barbican Young Poet and four-time winner of the Foyle Young Poets award, she’s no stranger to the publishing process, having released her first full-length collection, Platinum Blonde, in 2020. But writing a book has been different, she tells me. “There’s something mental that happens when you do all the physical things for the first time,” she says, of receiving copies of the novel. “I used to be a bookseller, so I’m good at ripping open cardboard boxes at frightening speed. Like a hunter gutting a deer.” Pretty fitting really, for the author of a book called Dead Animals.

Here, we speak to Stuckes about her writing process, the ‘sad girl lit’ label, and the queerness of the horror genre.

I’m interested in how you structured the novel – it’s quite fragmentary, or episodic. What was your writing process like?

Phoebe Stuckes: I tend to work in scenes, which I thought was an idiot’s way of doing it. But apparently other writers do it, so it’s fine! That was what felt most natural to me. I always knew how it was going to end – the mystery was how they were going to get there.

I feel like there are writers – great writers, like Hilary Mantel – who have timelines, and links, and where everybody is on different dates, and that works very well for them. But for me, the plot was completely incidental. I know where it starts and where it ends. How they get there is the interesting journey. But also, the narrator’s perception of time is important because her work pattern is weird. So her perception of when things are happening is a bit strange as well.

A lot of things have come out recently that spin around restaurant work, like The Bear and The Menu. How do you see the novel in relation to this wave of restaurant horror?

Phoebe Stuckes: The wave started when I was in the middle of writing it, and I was like, ‘Oh no. Everyone’s going to be sick of this by the time it comes out.’ The way the zeitgeist moves is confusing. I haven’t seen The Menu, I deliberately didn’t watch it. The Bear – actually, my editor told me to watch it. You know when I was talking about uncomfortable group scenes? It does that very, very well. The unpredictability of people’s actions. I find it very realistic to the kitchen environment. I almost found it quite difficult to watch. I think to some extent it’s about somebody trying to do their art in a difficult situation. This thing about Carmy being an artist maybe hasn’t been picked up on.

I told my agent about this, saying that I thought I was like Carmy. She was like, ‘yeah, you’d probably lose six weeks of sleep over a sandwich.’

This is a good point to ask about the character, Noah, who is a chef in the restaurant where the narrator works. What do you think of him?

Phoebe Stuckes: People’s perspective on Noah is very interesting. I’ve heard a couple of men think that he was nice, which is fascinating to me. It’s difficult because he doesn’t think he’s doing anything wrong. But he’s not really aware of the power dynamic at play. And I don’t think he did really mean any harm. He thought he was just pursuing a girl who was in front of him. He’s just massively barking up the wrong tree. It’s also a situation in which she can’t complain.

I’m tempted to give him allowances because he’s my creation, but here’s the thing: she goes to work with her face all banged up, and nobody says anything about it. And this is somebody who purports to be interested in her wellbeing. What I’m really trying to convey is that what people want is for there to be terrible experiences that are illegal, that can be dealt with through the legal system, and then they want everyone else to be a nice guy. But that’s not reality. There are all these other things that can wear down on you over the course of decades that make you feel miserable, powerless and discriminated against. So it’s about trying to find language for all of these different experiences. Because she’s traumatised and being hit on: these two things are not going to mix well together.

Also, this is a workplace where everybody’s around each other all the time, and it gets late, and it’s so gossipy.

“It’s much easier to say ‘this book is a sad girl novel’, than say ‘this book is about capitalism’. It’s about seeing something as a product, as opposed to a work of art” – Phoebe Stuckes

That’s often seen as part of the appeal of hospitality work, but can also be its biggest issue.

Phoebe Stuckes: It’s a double-edged sword. I waitressed with people I’d take a bullet for, but at the same time, if you’ve got a problem with somebody, God help you.

I’m also interested in the idea of the macho male chef, because it’s so omnipresent. I love Anthony Bourdain, don’t get me wrong. But lots of people think that they’re Anthony Bourdain and they’re not. I feel like a lot of the chefs who identify with him don’t identify with him being, for example, a very big supporter of the MeToo movement. He was also very upfront about the fact that he was a soft-handed middle-class boy. He’s very open about his own privilege. And he had a genuine respect for women.

At the same time, I really want to emphasise that some of the chefs I’ve known have worked harder than anyone I’ve ever met. Bourdain is quite right to say they are like the marines, because it is an extreme situation. They’re very underpaid. They work very long hours. That’s not really an excuse for the misogyny, which seems to be endemic, but I do think it’s important to acknowledge that there is a labour problem. They’re very undervalued and they are artists.

I find Helene very interesting as a character. She’s alluring, but disturbing, and hard to get to grips with, because you’re seeing her through the narrator’s eyes.

Phoebe Stuckes: The narrator’s perspective is limited. She’s a little bit unreliable. She’s also permanently exhausted, so she doesn’t really understand what’s happening at times.

Helene is self-serving in the extreme, which I think can help explain some of her actions. She’s not concerned with other people. She knows all the right things to say and all the right things to do. Only later do you see the facade split and she starts saying what she really thinks. She is excessively concerned with appearances. She’s aware of the effect that she’s having on other people. But she’s blithely unaware of her own privilege.

It’s not that there’s no attraction there, otherwise they would never have begun talking in the first place. But Helene is only really concerned with what she feels and what she wants to happen. And then the consequences go down like dominoes.

A recent review of the book linked it to the ‘sad girl lit’ trend. What are your thoughts about that term?

Phoebe Stuckes: I feel like a lot of very disparate things get lumped into one category. I have to imagine that to some extent it’s an SEO thing. It’s just a way of describing contemporary fiction. And then also the use of the word girl is… not great. It’s all very Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women’s Writing. The use of the term ‘sad’ I find stupid. ‘Sad’ as a stand-in for ‘angry’ is interesting to me. Because it’s more comfortable than saying that somebody’s filled with angst or rage, right?

It’s a thorny issue, because I don’t want it to seem like I’m not aware or interested in the issue of publishing being white, female, middle-class dominated, which is a huge problem. But a lot of what people are talking about are issues they have with contemporary fiction generally. They’ve just decided it's a ‘sad girl’ problem when actually a lot of it is to do with being disaffected under late capitalism.

 “There’s no solution to what I’m talking about. I’m not a theorist. If I had real, concrete solutions to this, I feel like I would have been much more vocal about that in places other than a novel” – Phoebe Stuckes

You’ve got novels that are talking about disaffection, power and labour, and it’s like, ‘if we then can brand it in this way, we can make it comfortable and sell it back’. It neutralises it, or attempts to.

Phoebe Stuckes: It’s much easier to say ‘this book is a sad girl novel’ than say ‘this book is about capitalism’. It’s about seeing something as a product, as opposed to a work of art and seeing writers as artists. You don’t see a woman as an artist, you see her as a sad girl who’s talking about her feelings, as opposed to somebody who’s worked at something.

The act of reading is also transformed into an act of consumption, where your identity is shaped through the books you buy.

Phoebe Stuckes: And whether you identify with the person in them. I have seen this come up again and again: ‘I didn’t identify with this narrator’, ‘I couldn’t identify with these characters’. And I’m like: good! Because I think the assumption is you can only identify with a character who’s good, right? You can’t identify with one who’s bad.

Do you think culture has shifted into more of a judgmental, moralistic response to art in general?

Phoebe Stuckes: I worry about that. This idea that you have to create some kind of narrative distance that indicates you, the writer, do not condone what’s going on.

Someone who had read the book said it had raised questions and not answered them. But there’s no solution to what I’m talking about. I’m not a theorist. If I had real, concrete solutions to this, I feel like I would have been much more vocal about that in places other than a novel. I do find it interesting that ambiguity frustrates some people, rather than opening up a door.

We’ve mentioned restaurant horror, but I’m also interested in how you see the book in relation to queer horror? That feels like a really generative genre at the moment.

Phoebe Stuckes: I would argue horror has always been a queer genre, because historically you could get away with depicting things you couldn’t depict elsewhere. Queer horror has always been around.

The marriage of the mundane and the mystical is very interesting to me. It was very much around in my childhood. I worked in a pub that people said was very haunted, and I grew up very religious as well. If you’ve been raised with religion, there’s this sense that ‘you shouldn’t go near that, because it might be real’. Whereas I feel like my friends who were raised atheists could use a Ouija board and think nothing will happen because none of it is real. The approach that myself and other friends who have been raised with religion is that you have to be very afraid of it. Because it could be real.

Dead Animals by Phoebe Stuckes is available now.