After a hugely exciting 2024, I’m so looking forward to 2025. There’s still much I can’t talk about, but I can say that my first adult novel in over ten years will be published in a co-ordinated worldwide release 23 September. Slashed Beauties is being called gothic feminist body horror and the story is based on real-life anatomical wax models called Anatomical Venuses, dissected graces or slashed beauties, which were originally designed to encourage male medical students to study female anatomy.
Slashed Beauties is a tale told in two timelines – in 1769 London we meet Eleanor, Emily and Elizabeth, whose lives become magically (and murderously) intertwined when they meet an anatomist with a wicked plan. And in present day London we have young antiques dealer Alys, who must find a way to break her cursed connection to the trio.
I first came upon the idea for Slashed Beauties after seeing an Anatomical Venus in a museum in Vienna. This wax model of a woman was naked except for some lustrous pearls at her neck. She had long flowing locks of real hair, dewy waxen skin, an erotic expression and … her entrails on display. I was, quite literally, mesmerized. To the modern eye, she was an uncanny collision of art and science and I immediately knew I would have to weave a tale around this complicated creature.
Slashed Beauties will be published by VERVE Books in the UK, Berkley/Penguin in the USA and HQ/HarperCollins in Australia/NZ as well as in several other territories and also in audio. I’ve just finished writing the second book in this contract, which looks at Victorian death photography.