The Cat Bride

Description

‘This debut novel establishes Tierney as a bold new voice in literary horror.’ —Gingernuts of Horror

‘Smart, knowing and wildly compelling.’ —Hazel Barkworth, author of Heatstroke and The Drownings

‘A Gothic fever dream of inheritance and transformation, where madness and strength are two sides of the same genealogy.’ —Livia Franchini, author of Shelf Life

‘As lushly hallucinatory as it is fierce’ —Paul Tremblay New York Times bestselling author of Horror Movie and A Head Full of Ghosts

‘The Cat Bride perches between the unearthly realm of fairytale and the feral tumult of adolescence’ —Matt Wesolowski, author of Six Stories

The heatwave of 1995. Sixteen years since an infamous tiger-lynx hybrid escaped a small moorland zoo and ate someone. Sixteen years since the animal was euthanised. Sixteen years for the zoo to fall into disrepair.

Then sixteen-year-old convalescent Lowdy, and her Mumma, are forced to move to the remote old zoo to care for her dying grandmother, and rumours of the animal stalking the moors resurface. Vengeful locals blame the three women for the predator on the loose. Mumma insists all the cats are dead. Grandma whispers that the ‘tynx’ needs to be fed. Lowdy, still recovering from her own mysterious illness, begins to wonder who she can trust. Can she even trust herself when she wakes up covered in ticks with no recollection of the night before?

As Lowdy searches for the truth – the truth of her childhood, what it means to be a woman, and the truth about the cats – she realises something feral runs in the blood, something she cannot ignore.

Much more than simply the wry horror of a young woman’s beastly metamorphosis, The Cat Bride views the eerie liminality of teenaged girls through a pastoral gothic fug of lairy nineties lads, booze and fags.