Saturnalia is about many things, but one of its core questions is about how women navigate their ambition in a world that doesn’t want them to achieve. For Lit Hub, I considered my own relationship with ambition, and seven more novels about women’s dark struggles with ambition, identity, and success.
As a writer and reader, I find joy in destruction as well as triumph. If you’re a woman, you can’t win without breaking the rules.
Just in time for Halloween season, I’m pleased to share this list of five scary novels that make the most of their settings. They exemplify how integral place is to great fiction; immerse readers in complex communities; and are creepy in classic and surprising ways. This list includes new titles and new classics, with authors and stories that span the Americas and Europe.
Today, Uncharted Magazine, one of my favorite genre publishes, released the first in my craft capsule essay series, “Writing Saturnalia.” I learned so much about plot, pace, and world-building by writing this book, and as a teacher, I’ve spent the last seven years thinking deeply about how we shape narrative. I’m excited to share this project, my first formal reflections on craft.
The first entry, “A Story Launch Thrives on an Easy Target,” explores how to use focused beginnings and clear stakes without diminishing ambitious story inquiries.
Saturnalia is about a lot of things: climate anxiety, social class, friendship and secrets, gender and power, the American city—as well as alchemy, secret societies, monsters, and pagan carnivals. All of the issues that matter to me, to us, and all of the trappings that make for a fun and atmospheric tale. My main character, Nina, grapples with society in decline, trauma, and the eternal puzzle of who she can trust.
But when the story begins, her problems and goals are simple.
Read more at Uncharted Magazine.
I’m pleased to share a new story, “Beneath Human Skin,” which appears in Khôra Issue 18 (October 2022). This is a rare story that doesn’t incorporate the supernatural, but I also think it’s one of my scarier pieces–here just in time for Halloween season. Here’s a little excerpt:
The cemetery gates were in sight when she heard another voice.
“Got bored?”
It was a man, sitting on the lip of one of the tombs. He had curly hair and a curly beard, both the color of lead — a shade that could have been gray or black. He was short, wiry, with shoulders that bulged in his t-shirt and veins that bulged on his forearms. She couldn’t guess his age; as he smiled, deep grooves descended from his eyes, but he was also ferociously tanned.
“Something like that,” Alicia said.
He stepped forward, held his palm open. She took a step forward, too.
It was a stick of gum.
“I don’t take candy from strangers.”
“Ha,” he said, and winked at her. He stuck the gum in his mouth and the wrapper in the pocket of his painter’s pants. “You’re a tourist.”
Read the rest at Khôra online.
Here it is, my fall 2022 calendar! Check the events page for updates.
Philadelphia Saturnalia Launch Party
with A.C. Wise and Gina Tomaine
October 11, 7pm
Main Point Books | Wayne, PA
Share and RSVP via Eventbrite
A Requiem for Witches at Fall for the Book
with Hester Fox
October 15, 1pm
George Mason University | Fairfax, VA
Full Festival Schedule
Cul-de-Sac Book Launch
with Nick Perilli, Daniel DiFranco, and Christina Rosso
October 21, 7pm
Arcadia University | Glenside, PA
Share and RSVP via Facebook
My new story is up at The Sunday Morning Transport! “The Sorcerer’s Test” is a fantasy-fairy tale with an edge. Tabitha, a young woman jaded from a lifetime of menial labor, gets a cushy job as a maid in a mysterious sorcerer’s house, where she finds more than gold coins–and has to decide what she wants most. Here’s a preview:
Tabitha was nursing a sour beer at the Bald Goat when Rosie opened the door. No one else in the tavern took notice of her return; Tabitha was the only one who knew about the job. Rosie hurried over, pulled her chair in close to the stick corner table. Her face was flushed, her eyes bright, as if on the edge of fever.
Tabitha felt something unusual—a flutter of curiosity. Still, she could only articulate the banal worst. “What did he do to run you off?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Rosie whispered. “Didn’t touch me. Barely talked to me.” She shifted her cloak to show the bulging purse tied against her right hip. Shifted the other side, revealed a second fat purse. “But it’ll take me ages to spend this. Figured I should get started sooner rather than later.” She paused. “And it did get lonely up there.”
There: the Sorcerer’s house.
The Sorcerer had lived in the woods beyond Creek’s End as long as anyone could remember. He rarely showed himself. For years, the only evidence of his presence was the colorful smoke slipping from the chimney and the occasional parade of shadowy figures in the forest, always drifting toward the house, never away.
Then Rosie met him among the trees, while on her way to spend a summer evening by the water. People liked to gather a half mile before the current slowed to mud and the sparsely populated town began; they liked to forget, temporarily, that they lived where the stream turned stagnant. Creek’s End.
The Sorcerer needed a maid and he offered Rosie the job. Now that she’d quit, he needed another.
“Go now,” Rosie said. “Before he finds someone else.”
Tabitha nodded. She had nothing else: no money, no work, no reason to stay, and nowhere else to go. She took what came to her. What would a girl like her dream about, anyway?
Rosie grabbed her wrist. “One last thing: Can you read?”
“You know I can read—”
“No,” Rosie said. “The answer is no. Remember that.”
Click here for more. The story is only available to subscribers, but Substack offers a free trial–and the subscription is well worth it, delivering a new fantasy short story to your inbox every Sunday.
I’m thrilled to launch Saturnalia at Main Point Books, where I launched my first novel and writing career many years ago. I’m just as excited to be joined by my friend, AC Wise, in conversation. Please join us on October 11 at 7pm! Details and RSVP here.
I’m thrilled to help Main Point Books welcome GennaRose Nethercott to Philadelphia and celebrate the release of her debut novel, Thistlefoot. The reading, conversation, and shadow puppet show are free and open to the public. RSVP here.
In the tradition of modern fairytales like American Gods and Spinning Silver comes a sweeping epic rich in Eastern European folklore – a debut novel about the ancestral hauntings that stalk us, and the uncanny power of story.
The Yaga siblings – Bellatine, a young woodworker, and Isaac, a wayfaring street performer and con artist – have been estranged since childhood, separated both by resentment and by wide miles of American highway. But when they learn that they are to receive a mysterious inheritance, the siblings are reunited – only to discover that their bequest isn’t land or money, but something far stranger: a sentient house on chicken legs.
Tor.com includes Saturnalia in its list of the “30 Most Anticipated SFF Books for the Rest of 2022!”
I love me a secret society, and honestly if I was invited to a club where the dress code was “blacker than the blackest black” I would be in so fast they’d barely have time to extend an actual invitation. The social clubs in Philadelphia are preparing for the Saturnalia carnival, a night of revelry and opulence. Nina is entering her old club, The Saturn Club, with a job to do—but it’s a job that’ll take her into the depraved depths of the Saturn Club and across the city on the longest night of the year. Saturnalia is part The Chosen & The Beautiful and part Eyes Wide Shut, wonderfully weird and chaotic and sexy and tinged with magic. It’s definitely a page-turner, and should be on the list for anyone who likes a little bit of romantic surrealism with their funhouse mirror dystopia.
I’m flattered to be on such an exciting list. Read the whole thing here.
I’m pleased to share this first review for Saturnalia. Publishers Weekly says, among some other cool things
The story features moments of bizarre, distressing cruelty and occasional gore, but it’s grounded in themes of belonging, friendship, and the potential costs of ambition. Feldman brings impressive richness and depth to both Nina’s emotional evolution and the masterful worldbuilding. This is sure to win the author many fans.
Nice!
