Glass House Is Proud to Present:
Something Wicked This Way Comes: A Queer Gothic Panel
The Common Press bookshop is thrilled to celebrate the UK release of Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea by hosting a fantastic Queer Gothic Fiction panel event!
Chaired by award-winning author Rivers Solomon (Sorrowland, An Unkindness of Ghosts), Julia will be in conversation with latest queer horror sensation Alison Rumfitt (Tell Me I’m Worthless).
Join us for an evening that promises to be compelling, fascinating and truly out of this world.
About Our Wives Under the Sea:
Miri thinks she has got her wife back, when Leah finally returns after a deep sea mission that ended in catastrophe. It soon becomes clear, though, that Leah may have come back wrong. Whatever happened in that vessel, whatever it was they were supposed to be studying before they were stranded on the ocean floor, Leah has carried part of it with her, onto dry land and into their home.
To have the woman she loves back should mean a return to normal life, but Miri can feel Leah slipping from her grasp. Memories of what they had before – the jokes they shared, the films they watched, all the small things that made Leah hers – only remind Miri of what she stands to lose. Living in the same space but suddenly separate, Miri comes to realise that the life that they had might be gone.
Our Wives Under The Sea is the debut novel from the critically acclaimed author of salt slow. It’s a story of falling in love, loss, grief, and what life there is in the deep, deep sea.
About Tell Me I’m Worthless:
A dark, unflinching haunted house novel that takes readers from the well of the literary gothic, up through Brighton’s queer scene, and out into the heart of modern day trans experience in the UK.
Three years ago, Alice spent one night in an abandoned house with her friends Ila and Hannah. Since then, things have not been going well. Alice is living a haunted existence, selling videos of herself cleaning for money, going to parties she hates, drinking herself to sleep. She hasn’t spoken to Ila since they went into the House. She hasn’t seen Hannah either.
Memories of that night torment her mind and her flesh, but when Ila asks her to return to the House, past the KEEP OUT sign, over the sick earth where teenagers dare each other to venture, she knows she must go.
Together Alice and Ila must face the horrifying occurrences that happened there, must pull themselves apart from the inside out, put their differences aside, and try to rescue Hannah, who the House has chosen to make its own.
Cutting, disruptive, and darkly funny, Tell Me I’m Worthless is a vital work of trans fiction that confronts both supernatural and real-world horrors as it examines the devastating effects of trauma and the way fascism makes us destroy ourselves and each other.
About Sorrowland:
A triumphant, genre-bending breakout novel from one of the boldest new voices in contemporary fiction.
Vern—seven months pregnant and desperate to escape the strict religious compound where she was raised—flees for the shelter of the woods. There, she gives birth to twins, and plans to raise them far from the influence of the outside world.
But even in the forest, Vern is a hunted woman. Forced to fight back against the community that refuses to let her go, she unleashes incredible brutality far beyond what a person should be capable of, her body wracked by inexplicable and uncanny changes.
To understand her metamorphosis and to protect her small family, Vern has to face the past, and more troublingly, the future—outside the woods. Finding the truth will mean uncovering the secrets of the compound she fled but also the violent history in America that produced it.
Rivers Solomon's Sorrowland is a genre-bending work of Gothic fiction. Here, monsters aren't just individuals, but entire nations. It is a searing, seminal book that marks the arrival of a bold, unignorable voice in American fiction.
About the Authors:
Julia Armfield lives and works in London. She is a fiction writer and occasional playwright with a Masters in Victorian Art and Literature from Royal Holloway University. Her work has been published in Lighthouse, Analog Magazine, The white Review and Salt's Best British Short Stories 2019. She was commended in the Moth Short Story Prize 2017, longlisted for the Deborah Rogers Prize 2018 and is the winner of The White Review Short Story Prize 2018.
Alison Rumfitt is a writer and semi-professional trans woman. Her debut pamphlet of poetry, The T(y)ranny, was a critical deconstruction of Margaret Atwood’s work through the lens of a trans woman navigating her own misogynistic dystopia. It was published by Zarf Editions in 2019. Tell Me I’m Worthless is her debut novel. Her work has appeared in countless publications such as SPORAZINE, datableed, The Final Girls, Burning House Press, SOFT CARTEL, Glass Poetry and more. Her poetry was nominated - twice! - for the Rhysling Award in 2018. You can find her on Twitter @hangsawoman and @alison.zone on Instagram. She loves her friends.
Rivers Solomon is the author of An Unkindness of Ghosts, winner of the CLMP Firecracker Award for best independently published novel, Sorrowland, and The Deep, a novella written in collaboration with Daveed Diggs and the rap group clipping., which was the winner of the 2020 Lambda Award and a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus and Goodreads Choice literary awards. Faer writing has been featured in Black Warrior Review, The New York Times, Guernica, Best American Short Stories and elsewhere. Originally from Turtle Island, fae currently lives in London with faer family.
Doors open at 6.30pm and the event will begin at 7.00pm. Please have your tickets with you. Julia, Alison, and Rivers will be available to sign copies of their books afterwards. All featured books will also be available for purchase on the night.