the French are noted for their skill in making forcemeats
Carrion Crow, Chapter 1: a sneak peek
This week, a little something different from me: an exclusive sneak preview of my forthcoming novel, Carrion Crow.
Publishing novels is a funny thing. You lose yourself entirely in this little world you’ve created, and the rest of humanity doesn’t get to see it until a couple of years later (or, in the case of many novels, including some of my own, ever). I wrote Carrion Crow before my first book came out, in six of the first lockdown weeks of 2020, not knowing if anyone would ever get to read it. I wrote it for no-one but myself, creating a novel that did exactly what I wanted it to do and say; the book I truly wanted to write. And like all my favourite things, she’s dark, weird, and very intense.
Here’s what the novel is about, officially:
Marguerite has been locked in the attic of her family home, a disintegrating Chelsea house overlooking the stench of the Thames. For company she has: a sewing machine, a copy of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management and trays of congealing food carried up to her with little regularity. Marguerite has been confined by her mother, Cécile, who is concerned about her engagement to an older, near-penniless solicitor, Mr Lewis, and wishes to educate her daughter on ‘proper’ married conduct—lest she drag the family’s good name into disrepute. But why is Marguerite pursuing the aged Mr Lewis in the first place? Why are her mother’s visits seemingly becoming less frequent? And just how much time has passed since the lock closed on the attic’s hatch?
Carrion Crow is a transportive and gloriously gothic commentary on the constraints of polite society—and the even greater danger of conformity—that unfurls one family’s festering secrets.
And here’s a few nice things that have been said about it so far:
One of the most important new voices in fiction, with Carrion Crow Heather Parry deduces an unutterable Gothic horror of class and gender from the pages of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management. A festering Edwardian nightmare dressed in exquisitely tailored language, Parry’s vision is magnificent and devastating.
—Alan Moore, author of Watchmen
Carrion Crow is a book to marvel at. Beautifully written with such dark, claustrophobic precision, exploring the devastating control we assert upon one another. Such an achievement.
—Rachelle Atalla, author of The Pharmacist
Carrion Crow picks at the scabs of class, sexual liberty and body autonomy in Victorian London and chews them over with grotesque attention to detail. Sharp, claustrophobic and undeniably gross, it revels in the repulsive and positions Heather Parry as both a punk Sarah Waters and the baddest bitch in the business. I can’t wait to see this strange bird fly to dizzying heights.
—Alice Slater, author of Death of a Bookseller
Carrion Crow is a rancid work of genius about the depths to which the world will go to rid women of their “unnatural desires”. This novel makes the walls close in and the body an oozing font of horror, and I fell in love with its wild beating crow heart. Heather Parry is a disgusting mastermind and I’d read anything she wrote.
—Jane Flett, author of Freakslaw
Both mouthwatering and revolting, a heady poisonous pudding of a book.
—Camilla Grudova, author of Children of Paradise
Sublime, wretched, harrowing, glorious.
—Kirsty Logan, author of Now She is Witch
My publishers have kindly allowed me to share this with you so that this book might find its way into the right hands; I think, if you read this substack, that you share my interest in food, the body, the class system and the strange behaviours of the human species. If so, and you enjoy this, and want to read more, you can find a pre-order link at the bottom of this post.
Happy reading!
Chapter 1:
the French are noted for their skill in making forcemeats
Marguerite Périgord had been confined for the sake of her wellbeing. That's what her mother had said, on that foggy February morning when she took Marguerite up the stairs with a small stack of books and an armful of bed linen and settled her into the small attic of the family home. Marguerite, Cécile's oldest daughter, was on the brink of putting herself out into the world, on the brink of marrying herself off to a man, and Cécile felt it necessary to bless her daughter with every single thing she knew about being such a thing—a woman, married to a man. There are some things about the world that only your mother can teach you. Cocoons are preparative, and time is essential. So into the attic Marguerite had gone, climbing the stairs towards her promised freedom, and she would stay there until she had learned the lessons that would prepare her for the real world, the lessons that only a mother could teach. Such a queer girl. It was for the sake of her own wellbeing.
The Périgord family lived in a smart house in Kensington, a residence befitting their blood, which was aristocratic, as Cécile would often remind them all, and French aristocratic at that, which was the best type. Marguerite had never lived in anywhere but the Kensington house; she was born within its walls, Cécile expelling her eldest child in her own bedroom on the first floor, screaming into a pool of her maternal blood, holding the hands of staff who'd delivered their own babies in tin baths, alone, while her husband was waiting elsewhere for news of her success. After her long recovery came Louis, and after that Thérèse, and then there were no more children because there was no more husband at all. From then it had been the four of them; the wellborn Périgords.
The family home was on a street called Cheyne Row; it had three stories above ground and a room at the top. A tall, thin house, like a top hat, with a secretive underworld in which all the work was, formerly, done. In the basement, a front and back kitchen, a larder, a coal cellar; an old well came up in the front kitchen and had to be covered, for the odours that came up from the ground were offensive to the nose and inappropriate for the preparation of food. On the garret floor, a large reception area where, in the better days, Cécile would take her guests, where the good china watched from highly polished furniture, where the family had taken the man whom Marguerite would marry and served him their most expensive tea. On the second floor, the cisterns, a bathing room and the grand bedroom for Cécile, with iron-wrought balcony front and back. The next floor, a bedroom for Louis, and for Thérèse, the room where Marguerite had previously stayed, a promotion from the dressing room that she'd had as a small child. A moderate and untended garden reached out from the backside of the house, and in it were trees as old as the family, twisted inwards and heavy with their own weight, their branches lowering with each passing year. Above all this was Marguerite.
The attic was the best place for her; it was self-contained and petite, and so small as to be easily kept neat at all times. Marguerite had an iron-framed bed on which lay two pillows, feather thin, for the straightness of the neck, and a cover for all seasons. Cécile had covered the floors in thick rugs, often overlapping, removed from other places in the house, to ensure a lightness of step and to keep away the drafts of autumn and winter. There was only a small skylight where the two sides of the roof met, no more than the width and height of a book, so that Marguerite might acquire the upper-class pallor that Cécile said she needed. She had spent too much of her youth in the sun. Her attic space was far from the kitchens, so she might shed some of the childhood weight around her face and arms. She had a small area in which to relieve herself and a shelf of tidy books, the pages of which had become wet- weathered and ripped with the ferocity of repetition. Her mother encouraged her to read the works of Victor Hugo, which Cécile said written by a fine Frenchman who knew about families like theirs. Marguerite tolerated these huge books, one of which ran to almost 1000 pages over three volumes, by selecting small sections, reading a scene or two and remaking the world in her head in a manner she would better enjoy, adding decadence and some fun for the characters. In the books of Victor Hugo there were a million dreary half-worlds to remake for yourself.
The other book Cécile encouraged her daughter to engage with religiously was Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management. The copy on the attic shelf was the one that had been given to Cécile on the event of her own marriage, and within it were notes scribbled in pencil as to the reception of the many dishes that had been served in the Périgord household over the years since: taken very well by Mr and Mrs Lincolnshire alongside a slice of tongue; cook reports that this jelly did not set, perhaps due to an excess of blood in the veal; made a young Louis vomit bile. Cécile held firm in her conviction that, mistress of a house or simply a wife needing to feed her working husband, every woman stood to learn something useful from Isabella Beeton. During her time in the attic, Marguerite had found this to be incontrovertibly true.
At the end of Marguerite's bed was a desk of very thick wood, yellow-brown, with knots engraved on the front of each wide leg. This was Marguerite's primary torment, for she wished to sit at the desk and rewrite her French stories, or draw a picture of her brother and sister, or press the bodies of the small insects that made their way out of the attic room's woodwork, but she could not. Affixed to the desk was a black and gold sewing machine with a stabbing needle and a heavy wheel, the mechanisms of which crowded the underneath, making it painful to sit at and awkward to avoid. It was Cécile's wish that Marguerite familiarise herself with the machine if she was determined to make the marriage she intended to; she would need a skill, if they were to live like her fiancé lived, without staff to assist them, and it was unclear whether the learning of this skill was meant as punishment or dissuasion; if only she would marry up, she would not need to bother with such things.
Marguerite had tried to wrestle with the machine, and each time the hole in the needle appeared to be smaller, and every attempt to make the needle fall made the wheel tighter still, as if the machine, as if the attic itself was constantly changing and reforming itself against her efforts. On the floor underneath her bookshelf was a set of cast iron scales in black, with a gold bowl on one side and on the other, a circular platform where weights would sit. There were only two weights left, the two heaviest of the set, and these were not intended for Marguerite, but were a remnant of one of Cécile's tempers; one day Thérèse had dropped the weights into the bath and caused the ceramic to crack and split, after which both weights and scales were banished to the attic, as was Thérèse for two days, or perhaps it was three—or five. Poor Thérèse had cried the entirety of her confinement, and it was only when she grew silent, having fallen faint due to lack of food, that Marguerite stormed the top of the house and rescued her. Cécile carried on her day as if nothing was amiss, and from somewhere she found the money to have the ceramic on the bathtub mended, though it was never as grand afterwards, and not one of the children mentioned it again. But the scales remained in the attic, tarnished with badness.
On the walls of the attic were portraits of Queen Victoria, three in total, and pinned tidily, a few of her favourite letters from her betrothed, and behind them Lincrusta-Walton paper, installed long ago with grand fanfare throughout the home, Cécile declaring, with assistance from a pamphlet, that it would not warp or be eaten by worms, was not cold in winter or hot in summer like stone or terracotta and was impenetrable and resistant to wet. Above Marguerite's head there was a ceiling which rose to a point, or rather which sunk at either edge of the room, making it difficult for her to stand nearest the walls. The paint covering the wood above her had flaked in places, and through the timber many-legged creatures had burrowed, leaving small holes through which drafts sometimes blew.
At the head of Marguerite's bed, sitting on a small set of drawers between mattress and bed, there was a creature dead and stuffed and mounted on a wooden plinth. It was a black bat, and it stood straight up instead of hung, its head tilted upwards as if howling, its wings half mast, its tiny claws lifted in celebration, and at the bottom of its strange legs were the feet of a small duck. If you lifted the creature into the light you would see that its wings were skin-paper, and if you ran your finger pad over its face you could feel its tiny teeth. Its borrowed feet were spread with dark grey flaking between each toe, a heel appendage at the back to help it stand, and Marguerite could fathom no reason for this debasement of both animals other than that the artists had been pressed to keep the artwork upright and thought he could improve on both of God's creations. Still, she could not part with it. Its progenitor had been a gift from her grandfather to her mother, the replacement passed on to Marguerite, and it reminded her that you could throw away the rules of life and let your creative instinct take over; that you can put strange, unfitting parts together and create something atypical but beautiful; something truly unique.
Marguerite's engagement was to a solicitor, a Mr George Lewis, thirty-five years her senior and hailing from the north. He was a man who had never entered into marriage before and had fathered no children; raising himself up from his beginnings he had learned his trade and invested in turning himself into the kind of person that would inspire love in a woman, rather than earning enough money to buy his way into someone's bed. Though decades separated them, Marguerite thought his grey hair attractive, and noticed the muscles of his calves through his trousers, and imagined about the broadness of his hands around her forearms at night, how she might feel comfort there, above anything else. On his shoulders he carried the weight of the law and if his clients could not afford his services he discounted them, sometimes to almost nothing at all, and each time he did this he increased the price of his work for those with money. He had several apprentices, some of whom lived in the lower rooms of his house without paying a penny, and she had seen him in the street giving money to beggars and those without shoes, the poor unwashed that her mother bade them turn away from. Mr Lewis had noticed Marguerite, in her flourishing youth, and tipped his hat, and called her Miss, and spoken well of her mother, and no one thought it strange that a man of almost sixty had such an interest in a girl of her age. This set Marguerite to thinking, and when she had seen him at London Zoo explaining the thylacine to his nephew she had marched over and spoken to him first. He was only a mite taller than her, and wider at the hips, and held himself straight, though his shoulders drooped from working over his books. His lips were wet and his hair was kept tight to his head, and he had pale wrinkles where he had squinted into the sun for the sake of feeling the heat on his face. That day at the zoo, she had seen him roll up his trouser legs and wade with his nephew into a pool so they could crouch and better see the crabs and sails and things that live under the water in puddles, not caring that the wetness was creeping up the fabric at his knees and his jacket was dangling dangerously close to the water level. He was older but for Marguerite he held the potential of joy, in more ways than one, and that was something that hadn't existed in the Périgord household, or in Marguerite's vision for the future, for all too long. Marguerite knew she would marry him.
While younger men tried to grab her in the streets, had pushed her up against horses and had thought themselves deserving of affections for nothing more than a bunch of flowers cheaply bought from a woman on the next road, Mr Lewis had courted her with tales of strange cases and readings from books. He had sent fresh scones to the Cheyne Row house to treat the whole family, and on visiting the house he had brought good sherry and, with Cécile's grudging permission, played the piano which hadn't been touched since their father's disappearance. He had taught Louis to play pontoon and showed Thérèse some sleight of hand, and by the time he left both of them begged Marguerite to marry him, though he had not yet asked. When the proposal came by couriered letter Cécile took it gently out of her hand and told her the marriage would not work; he was not of the same breeding as their family, and it would save Marguerite the ignominy of a divorce to politely turn him down now. But it was Mr George Lewis that Marguerite thought she could spend the long evenings with, on those nights past physical affection, when they were companions most of all, two people in a house that would support them both, and so after weeks of pained silence on Cheyne Row, during which the children barely spoke and Marguerite quietly packed a suitcase in case she was sent away in disgrace, Cécile quietly re-read the letter, took some books from their sparse shelves, and promised her oldest daughter that she would prepare her for her marriage; she would teach the girl all the lessons she needed to learn.
Marguerite did not relish the prospect of weeks in the attic, with its drafts and its spiders and long days with nothing to do, but Cécile spent a day arranging things that might entertain her daughter in the correct ways, and Marguerite recognised that it was the attic or nothing. Freedom always comes at a price, that much she had learned, and a confinement was a small sacrifice for the reward of being able to set the rest of her life exactly as she wanted it. She sent a letter to Mr Lewis, saying she would need a brief engagement, and that she would be unable to see him until she had allowed her mother time enough to prepare her in whatever way Cécile saw fit. And now the couple communicated solely through letters, one each week, his affections more muted on some occasions and more blunt on others, but each time Cécile brought a letter to her daughter Marguerite was renewed, and applied herself to her books, and quoted Mrs Beeton's thoughts on yeast dumplings and carving game, and ate her next meal in a manner restrained and delicate, and thought of the day she would marry her rolled-up-trouser husband, and her life could truly start.
But until then, she must wait. Sometimes, on long afternoons alone with her books, Marguerite would stare at the browning pages and listen to the world outside her chrysalis, the world into which she would eventually emerge, a fully formed fluttering thing with sheer wings and soft landing feet. Below her Louis and Thérèse went on with their lives, too young to worry yet about the manner of their marriages, still concerned with their schooling and the fashions that they hoped would not pass them by. Friends were not often welcomed into the house, for Cécile found few families that she felt she could trust, or whose children could be expected to keep to the standards of a Périgord home (though this could also be said of her own children). So the house remained quiet, with its staff whittled down to one cook who came in the mornings from her house nearby and a cleaner who lived in her own home some miles away and trundled in on the carriages, and Louis and Thérèse tried their best not to interrupt their sister's preparations for marriage, never knocking at her attic hatch or shouting her name from the tops of the staircase, nor bringing her sweets or other distractions that might make her preparations last even longer than they must.
Likewise, London had not waited for her appearance; it had not asked where she had gone, the red-cheeked, black-haired girl who used to run around its streets, who grew from a baby into a woman within its embrace. London went on regardless of Marguerite, without Marguerite, forgetting Marguerite. Hooves and carriages clattered across the cobblestones. Messengers shouted their deliveries. Children tripped and smashed their noses on the pavements, shouted at by their nannies. Marguerite thought she could hear the howling cries of families in Battersea Park, or the educated men walking in the physic garden, or perhaps even the rattling chests of the terminal inmates at the consumption hospital in Brompton. But more intensely than any of these things she could smell the shit-stink of the Thames, the deadly sewer on which boats brought wealth from abroad. The year she was born there had been six feet of pure filth on top of the water, Cécile had told her, and when Marguerite was nursing the streets of the city had been so hot that the river fell and the excrement stuck to its walls and the whole of London choked on the poison smell of its own productions. Her first steps were taken with the stench of the river waiting just at the door. As she grew, newspapers said that new measures were in place, that London was cleaner, that the people within it were now spared from all of that. And it seemed to be so; the fug of excrement had lifted, for a while, and Londoners had breathed a little easier. But in her attic Marguerite could once again smell the disgust of Thames; she went to sleep with the miasma pooling on her pillow and woke to the fresh assault of human waste, having dreamt of cholera and dyspeptic expulsions, and sometimes, if she was lucky, her wedding.
But Marguerite's confinement was for the sake of her wellbeing. She had been named for a princess of France, with all the traits and impulses that came with it. She could not marry until her mother was sure she would not make the mistakes that she, herself, had made, that had taken a young woman and left her bereft, decaying, inside Cheyne Row.
If you liked this, and want to read more come February 27th 2025, you can pre-order from the button below or via your favourite indie bookshop. Pre-orders make all the difference to authors these days—they show anticipation for the book, instruct the publishers to support it, and help to ensure it reaches its readership—and it means you’ll get the novel posted direct to you, before anyone else. And if you do it via the button below, it’ll even be signed and dedicated too.
Next fortnight, back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Oof, the minute I saw the title it took me back! Gosh. This book wrecked me.
I cannot wait to read this! 🖤