Sam Beckbessinger's werewolf satire sinks its teeth into perimenopause

Sam Beckbessinger was refueling the car and queuing for the bathroom after 10 days off grid at “South Africa’s version of Burning Man” when her phone started “downloading literally 800 messages” with the news that her adult debut was going to auction in the UK and the US wanted to pre-empt. “It was the best way to pee,” she laughs.

We are chatting on a bright wintry day in Bloomsbury’s London office about Beckbessinger’s blazing horror novel, Femme Feral. Darkly humorous and violent, the novel follows Ellie, a formidable woman in her mid-40s working at Tranquility in London, a company that provides meditation recordings via an app. She is on the way to what should be the crowning achievement of her career – her appointment as CEO – when she is hit by a bike. Injured and surrounded by a crowd of worried pedestrians, including an odd elderly lady, Ellie, unfazed, makes her way to the office.

But Ellie does not get promoted. In front of her peers, it is announced that Andreas, a new hire from outside the industry, will take the helm. Full of outrage and disbelief, her head injury from the morning throbbing, Ellie faints. In the hospital, reeling off a list of symptoms, Ellie is informed she has entered perimenopause. But could these symptoms be caused by something else? Something that would explain her sudden craving for meat, untameable body hair and waking up in strange places, gore in her hair, the morning after the full moon? “I think there’s a joke at the centre of this book, which is that the medical industry knows about as much about perimenopause as it does about lycanthropy,” says Beckbessinger. “What so much of this came out of was my deep anger watching my friends needing help at this stage of life, needing practical medical help, and there’s nothing.”

There are layers of anger and retribution in the novel. One is Andreas whose name is no happenstance. In the wake of the UK Supreme Court ruling last year that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex, authors Jeannette Ng and Lauren Beukes established the Genre Creators for Trans Rights auction. Not having a finished book to contribute, Beckbessinger sold the rights to name Femme Feral’s antagonist: “I was like, I will name them after whoever you want and bad things will happen to them in the book.”

A decade spent working in fintech informed much of the workplace scenes and goings-on in the novel. Like Ellie, Beckbessinger’s boss was passed over for promotion. Hoping to push Andreas out, Ellie suggests a disastrous AI tool that produces meditations based on the user’s needs. One of the AI meditations in the novel was created using ChatGPT to “mock” the bot’s ability to produce meaningful content. It begins: “Let your thoughts be the guide and the path to destiny is and you are not afraid of the guide.” Beckbessinger finds AI “deeply, profoundly disturbing” and uses this nonsensical babble as a way of “skewering” the idea of AI therapy. “I think that in general what the tech world does is [say] ‘Here’re these really complicated, human problems. Here’s a simple solution.’”

Beckbessinger’s werewolf is terrifying. She wanted to do “something a little bit surprising” and took inspiration from the horror films of David Cronenberg, particularly The Fly. “There is something quite insectile” about Ellie’s wolf-form, she explains. It scuttles, clambers, her limbs awkward at disjointed angles: an eldritch monster stalking the streets of Walthamstow. Ellie must work out what is happening before she is caught. But someone is on her tail – Brenda, an octogenarian vigilante determined to track down the beast that killed her cat. Alongside Brenda and Ellie’s alternating chapters, Beckbessinger includes one from the perspective of Ellie’s daughter, Paige, a student at the London School of Economics who is also recovering from an eating disorder. Something triggers Paige to spiral, and we see a young woman, full of hurt and anxiety, direct all this pain and anger onto her body. Events collide, bringing the truth to the surface and forcing the three women through a brutal reckoning.

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