Full of heartbreak, revulsion and black humour, a scientist desperately searches for a cure to a zombie virus while also hiding a monumental secret – her undead husband.

Kesta’s husband Tim was the last person to be bitten in a zombie pandemic. The country is now in a period of respite, the government seemingly having rounded up and disposed of all the infected.

But Kesta has a secret . . .

Tim may have been bitten, but he’s not quite dead yet. In fact, he’s tied to a bed in her spare room. And she’s made him a promise: find a cure, bring him back.

A scientist by day, Kesta juggles intensive work under the microscope alongside Tim’s care, slipping him stolen drugs to keep him docile, knowing she is hiding the only zombie left. But Kesta is running out of drugs – and time. Can she save her husband before he is discovered? Or worse . . . will they trigger another outbreak?

One Yellow Eye is due for release 17th July – you can pre-order your copy HERE

My Femgore Favourites

by Leigh Radford

Femgore is a space within speculative fiction, centred around horror (but for me it can lean into other things, like humour and dark romance), where women writers are gleefully tapping into their uglier and more vicious natures to explore extreme violence, body horror and the extremes of female experience. Some say it’s a reaction to centuries of being forcibly cast as the victims of toxic male objectives – it is typically us getting slain in myriad gruesome ways – but for me, femgore is about liberating the constraints of what it is to be female, throwing off the shackles of politeness and passivity, and writing what we know, and I’d argue that no-one knows gore like women. We bleed, we give birth, our bodies turn against us, all the while enduring societies efforts to control the way we use them. Femgore is a grounded exploration of the world around us, its female and its male parts and everything in between. It isn’t just women serving as murderesses and cannibals, it’s women exerting control and influence in deadly, demonic or dangerous ways, over anyone who gets in their way.

In my debut One Yellow Eye, Kesta Shelley harbours a dark secret. Her husband – presumed by everyone to have been killed during a recent zombie virus outbreak – actually lies handcuffed to a radiator in their spare room, while Kesta, a talented but increasingly unhinged scientist, works frantically and unethically to bring him back from the undead. Everything Kesta does she does for love but that doesn’t alter the fact that she is holding her husband captive against his will while she experiments on him with drugs she has stolen at work. And there is nothing that Kesta won’t do, including harming other people and herself, in her pursuit. I think my novel is on the lighter end of the femgore spectrum, focusing on body horror and the results of Kesta’s experimentation as experienced by her husband, but it was the best way for me to write about the grief I was trying to process in the novel, having nursed my father when he was terminally ill. Femgore was a bloody, messy, relentless, vital way out of the gloom. 

If you’re new to femgore here are four of my recent favourites.

Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito

I love Virginia’s bitter, twisted, incisive prose which makes me gasp and giggle in the same sentence. Victorian Psycho, her second novel, is a rollocking read as a demented governess with a venal vendetta hacks her way through a short stint teaching the thankless children of a truly despicable couple in their country pile and it culminates in a spectacularly blood-soaked Christmas. The violence is extreme and extremely funny in the nonchalant, almost practical way it’s described. 

The Eyes Are The Best Part by Monika Kim

I think everyone was seduced by the cover for this book because it’s so confrontational on the front and then the back jacket is deliciously naughty. Ji-won’s rage-filled unravelling as her mother’s new boyfriend irritates her to distraction with his blue-eye misogyny had me completely hooked. Like a lot of femgore there’s a serious message beneath the blood and guts, and Monika Kim’s ability to make the reader question the treatment of Asian women in the west is never heavy handed, only ever smartly subversive. And there’s a clever twist, which is always an unexpected bonus.

Boy Parts by Eliza Clark

Boy Parts is the kind of debut so good it almost makes you want to give up writing! But the cracking thing about femgore is the incredible range and talent of the women writing it. Eliza Clark is an audacious writer, and her debut is as grotesque as it is grubby, timely and horribly, horribly funny. I snorted with laughter at some of the depictions of Irina, a woman desperate to revive her career as an artist, as she sets about taking explicit photographs of random men she meets in Newcastle. Irina loves boozing and behaving badly but she also wants to be treated well and taken seriously. As her strident feminism starts to clash with the ever growing allure of fetishism, you just know that her implosion will be epically unforgettable.

This Immaculate Body by Emma van Straaten

Obsession has an unnervingly female aspect to it, and Emma van Straaten explores it with such daring finesse here in a book that I loved so much I’m going to read it again whenever I go on holiday. It’s that good. I was heartbroken but also unnerved by Alice, the woman who’s been diligently – slavishly almost – cleaning Tom’s flat for a year without ever having met him. She creates a fantasy world around him, fleshing out the little she knows with extravagant creativity. So when they finally meet in person, Alice can only ever be disappointed, can’t she? It’s one of the few books to actually give me chills. And the ending. Prepare yourself for that one…

One Yellow Eye is due for release 17th July – you can pre-order your copy HERE

Leigh Radford trained as a broadcast journalist. She produced and presented arts and entertainment content and documentaries for UK commercial radio, BBC Radio, Time Out, The Times and The Sun. A former book publicist, she is a 2023 graduate of Faber Academy. She is currently developing content for film and television through her production company, Kenosha Kickers.