Strange Practice

"I just absolutely loved this book. I love relatively low stakes, quiet urban fantasy , and I love the spate of books coming out that have that low-key profile – I just finished the sequel (or prequel) to Legends and Lattes , Bookshops and Bonedust . Strange Practice is another great example of that, set in Britain. Dr Greta Helsing is a GP for supernaturals. There start to be murders, then she is followed and threatened. I don’t want to give anything away – it’s really easy to slip into spoilers with this book! She ends up being kidnapped and figuring out this string of what look like religious serial killer murders – but in fact, there’s a supernatural reason for them. And she has to be rescued by a band of supernatural misfits, which is part of the fun. It has a nice little romance too. It’s one of the books that I’ve actually read two or three times over the years – I’m not necessarily much of a re-reader of popular fiction, but this is one of the popular fiction books I have returned to, because it’s just such a pleasure. These misfits are characters that were hugely popular – old stock characters, like vampires Ruthven and Varney – but that didn’t endure like Dracula, partially because they were so self-flagellating and annoying. She plays with that: she doesn’t forget, and suddenly make them sexy. She’s very true to their ridiculous, mellow, dramatic characters. They were written as serials in papers. They are over-the-top absurd, written a penny a word or whatever, with overly florid descriptions of everything. They both help set that trope of the self-hating vampire: the “I don’t want to be a murderer, but I have to eat,” story; or, “I love this person; I’m going to eat them.” For anyone who’s interested they’re all out there on the internet, free of charge, because they’re hundreds of years old at this point. They were hugely popular. Honestly, when I wrote the book, I didn’t know what I was doing! I had just finished my PhD and I had time before I graduated and started my new job, and I started writing this fantasy novel; and it was the most self-indulgent experience ever. I just put in everything I would want to read about; it was me just enjoying the genre that I’d love since I was a child, and hadn’t been able to read for years because I was reading serious literature. I was having fun. The main character Jane is a selkie. Selkies are seal shapeshifters, but the kicker is that they don’t transform like a werewolf; they actually shed their skins. And if their skins are collected, they’re the prisoner of whoever has it. I’ve always been obsessed with selkie mythology – I did a summer college when I was in high school where I took an Irish mythology class and learned about them. They’re liminal characters, caught between two worlds. There’s a lot of misogyny in the myths, depending on the version you hear – oftentimes their skins are stolen by people. So they’re basically these weird trafficked brides. And the Irish knew how to turn the screws in their stories, so they would have children, and it was the children that would find their missing skin. Sometimes the children could go with the selkie for whatever reason, but more often she would get her freedom, and she would have to leave her children. They were bizarrely beautiful stories, but if you take ten minutes to think about it, you realise – this is horrible! I always really loved those stories, and the way they captured what I’m sure was very much a reality for a lot of women in those societies – that idea of being trapped in patriarchal systems, where your labour as a wife was all-important. So that’s where the selkies came from. And then I just had fun, researching all the bizarre creatures that we’ve invented as part of our global subconscious. “I’m really engaged with this idea of the allure of the paranormal, the allure of mystery and death” Selkies are very vulnerable, and part of my intention with Jane True was to create an anti-kickass-heroine – or rather, I wanted her to be kickass in the way that most of the non-supernatural women I know are. They aren’t necessarily martial arts masters, but they still manage to do amazing things. Jane True has a tragic backstory, and a secret: she swims every night in the freezing cold waters off Maine, which should lead to death. Her mother disappeared when she was a young woman, and he was raised by a father who’s loving but poorly. And one night, she discovers a body in the Old Sow , a real whirlpool right off Eastport, Maine – and again, something you’re not supposed to swim in. She brings the body to the shore, and that means she’s embroiled in a supernatural mystery. And she learns about her secret heritage: her mother was a selkie, so she’s a halfling. And there’s something running around murdering halflings."