Carrion Crow - by Heather Parry (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

There are some things only your mother can teach you . . .

In this viscerally strange and dark, queer Victorian gothic, longing and transformation take wing through the secret selves we nurture when no one is watching.

"A fetid feast of body horror and delirium." --Booklist

Marguerite Périgord is locked in the attic of her family home, a towering Chelsea house overlooking the stinking Thames.

For company she has a sewing machine, Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management, and a carrion crow who has come to nest in the rafters. Restless, she spends her waning energies on the fascinations of her own body, memorising Mrs. Beeton's advice and longing for life outside.

Cécile Périgord has confined her daughter Marguerite for her own good.

Cécile is concerned that Marguerite's engagement to a much older, near-penniless solicitor, will drag the family name - her husband's name, that is - into disrepute. And for Cécile, who has worked hard at her own betterment, this simply won't do. Cécile's life has taught her that no matter how high a woman climbs she can just as readily fall.

Of course, both have their secrets, intentions and histories to hide. As Marguerite's patience turns into rage, the boundaries of her mind and body start to fray.

And neither woman can recognise what the other is becoming.

Fusing grisly body horror with raw and evocative prose, this unforgettably haunting gothic novel from award-winning author Heather Parry is a story of mothers and daughters, and the dual capacity for both great kindness and unfathomable cruelty.

Review Quotes

"As mesmerizing as it is surreal, Carrion Crow is a haunting gothic tapestry."
--Lucy Rose, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Lamb

"One of the best books I've read this year! . . . I loved it."
--Julia Armfield, author of Private Rites and Our Wives Under The Sea

"A gruesome, provocative, stylish fairytale . . . A true Gothic gem."
--Kaliane Bradley, bestselling author of The Ministry of Time

"One of the most important new voices in fiction, with Carrion Crow Heather Parry deduces an unutterable Gothic horror of class and gender . . . magnificent and devastating."
--Alan Moore, award-winning author of Watchman and V for Vendetta

"Grizzly, compelling, and utterly claustrophobic."
--Heather Darwent, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Things We Do to Our Friends

"Beautifully written with such dark, claustrophobic precision, exploring the devastating control we assert upon one another. Such an achievement."
--Rachelle Atalla, award-winning author of The Pharmacist

"Delicate, deftly written and enticingly obscene, Carrion Crow will captivate you from the first sentence and haunt you long after the story ends. I've never read anything quite like it."
--Jan Carson, prize-winning author of The Raptures

"A brilliant, fecund, vividly embodied book. Carrion Crow gives us the seams where mind touches body, where lust touches revulsion, where past touches present touches future--and Parry lines these meeting points with all the rot and richness out of which the most beautiful, terrifying things grow. I loved this gorgeous, grotesque stew of a novel."
--Clare Beams, author of The Garden

"Carrion Crow, surely, will win awards . . . Every sentence oozes a crushed purple poetry, overripe with devastation and wretchedness . . . If you finish it feeling you might just skip dinner, then you also feel filled with awe for a writer so gifted at conveying this much ick in such luxuriant, refulgent style."
--Observer

"Nods to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper and, more obliquely, to the mythic grotesquerie of Angela Carter's early fiction."
--Times Literary Supplement

"Carrion Crow may be set in a fetid late Victorian London and couched in lightly brocaded prose, but what lurks within is unmistakably red in tooth and claw, a creature nearer in kinship to Kathy Acker than to Sarah Waters . . . richly fecund and adult in every sense of the word."
--Guardian

"Carrion Crow is a worthy entrant into the contemporary gothic hall of fame . . . I'm not sure the pure rancidness of this book will ever totally leave me."
--Financial Times

"Haunting and vivid, creating that palpable sense of isolation so hard to create. Parry's atmospheric storytelling leaps off the page."
--Glamour

"What a truly disturbing tale!"
--CrimeReads

"The characters are lush, and while the story is often uncomfortable to read, it is impossible to look away from. Any reader searching for a true Gothic story will find a fetid feast of body horror and delirium in these pages."
--Booklist

"Potential methods of attaining freedom twist upon generations of hopeful women in the macabre, wrenching feminist novel Carrion Crow."
--Foreword Reviews

About the Author

Heather Parry is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. Her debut novel, Orpheus Builds a Girl, was shortlisted for the Saltire Fiction Book of the Year award and longlisted for the Polari First Book Prize. She is also the author of a short story collection, This Is My Body, Given For You, and a short nonfiction book, Electric Dreams: On Sex Robots and the Failed Promises of Capitalism, and writes the Substack general observations on eggs. She was raised in Rotherham and lives in Glasgow with her partner and their cats, Fidel and Ernesto.