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Witches, ghosts and feminism: how female authors are rewriting horror fiction

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize

Everything Under

Johnson attacks the Oedipus myth with a taste for gothic horror and a radical vision based on gender fluidity ... Her clever layering of ancient and modern makes for a disturbing take on the illusion of free will and the horrible things that women sometimes think and do.

I was quite late into work because I couldn’t stop reading it.

A thrillingly bewildering reading experience. It often seems like you’re feeling your way submerged, from paragraph to paragraph, rather than safely strapped in for a conventionally neater narrative ride… What lurks beneath is literary fiction at its troublesome best.

Daisy Johnson was born in 1990. Her debut short-story collection, Fen, was published in 2016. In 2018 she became the youngest author ever to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize with her debut novel, Everything Under. Her 2020 novel Sisters was adapted into the 2024 feature film September Says. She is the winner of the Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize, A. M. Heath Prize and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Her debut play, Viola’s Room, was produced in 2024 by the immersive theatre company Punchdrunk. She currently lives in Oxford by the river.

'Weird and wild and wonderfully unsettling... Dive in for just a moment and you'll emerge gasping and haunted' Celeste Ng, bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere 
 
 It's been sixteen years since Gretel last saw her mother, half a lifetime to forget her childhood on the canals. But a phone call will soon reunite them, and bring those wild years flooding back: the secret language that Gretel and her mother invented; the strange boy, Marcus, living on the boat that final winter; the creature said to be underwater, swimming ever closer. 
 
 In the end there will be nothing for Gretel to do but to wade deeper into their past, where family secrets and aged prophesies will all come tragically alive again. 
 
 'As readable as it is dazzling, full of unsettling twists and dark revelations' Observer 
 
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018**

Sisters

The electrifying new novel from the Man Booker-shortlisted author of Everything Under

A short, sharp explosion of a gothic thriller whose tension ratchets up and up to an ending of extraordinary lyricism and virtuosity.

Observer *Fiction to Look Out for in 2020*

A haunting, emotionally acute novel with a terrific twist.

[A] gothic masterpiece... You can't stop reading... This taut, lyrical firecracker of a book crescendos into an emotional ambush of a climax, which...confirms Johnson as a profoundly inventive and masterful storyteller.

A tour-de-force... Johnson's prose seduces us with the promise of comfort and then yanks that comfort away.

Exhilarating... A masterful follow up to her debut, Johnson's novel is quietly terrifying and certainly an apt read for 2020.

Daisy Johnson is the demon offspring of Shirley Jackson and Stephen King... Readers will find many pieces of treasure buried here... Terrifically well-crafted, psychologically complex and chillingly twisted.

A second novel that should see [Johnson] consolidate her grip on power... A book less likely to chew you up than screw you up.

A short, sharp shock of a book... Johnson's lyrical prose and knack for conjuring unsettling moments makes for an impressive read. Sisters will, I suspect, be a big hit.

The creeping, physical menace that made Johnson's debut so memorable commands this book, too... It makes an immediate impression -- there's a weight to it which doesn't shift when you put it down.

A dark, slippery, psychological, gothic horror tale...with a rhythmic, visceral energy.

The stories Daisy Johnson tells are at once heart-rending and hair-raising. Her prose is elegantly emotional; her plotting would make Shirley Jackson, a master of upmarket horror, proud. Sisters, her second novel, is a gripping, if nightmare-inducing, tale.

[Johnson] can pace a narrative as scarily and surprisingly as any airport thriller-writer; she can also write like an angel, evoking sights and smells, changes in the weather, the landscape inside your head... I guarantee that once you start this novella, the world will be dead to you until it is finished. And when it is finished, the world will have changed.

Daisy Johnson's extraordinary second novel, Sisters, a short, sharp virtuoso tale of literary horror with a stop-you-in-your-tracks ending that casts the entire novel in a different light.

An uncanny, Gothic tale... Deeply unnerving and unnervingly prescient.

Johnson uses words like some artists use paint, saturating her sentences with images and sensations in ways that lend a delirious, sensorial quality to her writing, yet which can also have an enervating impact on the actual plot. But just when you wonder where this hallucinatory novel is going, Johnson beautifully wrong-foots you with a shivery denouement that makes the ghosts in her story all too real.

This is the second novel from super-talented Johnson, who made headlines as the youngest author to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2018, and is written in poetic, haunting prose to be savoured slowly.

One of the rare novels that balances an almost-uncomfortable level of tension with gloriously stylish prose throughout. There's an element of escapism in the profoundly creepy, and the masterful claustrophobia of Sisters will deliver you from your own.

A blistering read. An exquisitely rendered exploration of sibling love and rivalry that rattles the core

I LOVE THIS BOOK! Explosive, dark, weird and utterly compelling... There are few writers as talented as Daisy. After reading Sisters, I binged on Fen and Everything Under and am now obsessed

Elizabeth Macneal, author of The Doll Factory

This is a book that makes you remember why you first fell in love with reading. I was haunted by it. Utterly unique.

Daisy Johnson is one of the best writers in this country ... an astonishing stylist. Sisters is a thumping good book, haunting, visceral and potent.

Max Porter, author of Grief Is The Thing With Feathers

Daisy Johnson is an enchantress who can turn the day into night and back again in a sentence. I love her prose so much, and this book was the sibling love-and-horror story of my dreams and nightmares.

A taut, disturbing, and brilliantly written psychological drama of the first order. You'll read for the quality of the prose, but also the amazing depth of characterization and mystery. Another great book from one of our finest writers.

Sisters has a hot, dark energy that thrums beneath the language like blood. Daisy Johnson’s portrayal of female relationships is sticky, close and true. It will seep into your skin and linger in your bones.

Johnson’s Sisters is haunted in the fullest sense; its very sentences governed by a sinister, spectral force. This is a novel we don’t so much read as wade through with our hands outstretched and our eyes clamped shut, holding our breath 'til morning.

Sue Rainsford, author of Follow Me to the Ground

Sisters is brilliant. Bold and tender. There is a physicality to its spell, muttered sometimes, sometimes screamed: we can empty of ourselves and become an object, while objects can flush with life. Daisy Johnson is a profound writer.

A beautiful, burning, disquieting marvel.

Very much for the gothic lovers amongst us and those that crave psychological suspense… [Sisters] has been compared to the likes of Shirley Jackson and Daphne du Maurier… This weaving of women’s bodies, sex, sisterhood with the physical world reminded me a lot of surrealist works by the likes of Dorothea Tanning and Frida Kahlo. Intriguing and a novel that stands out in its originality.

Johnson returns with a well-crafted, consistently surprising psychological thriller... When the revelations hit, they are intensely powerful. Readers of classic gothic fiction will find a contemporary master of the craft here.

Johnson-whose first novel, Everything Under (2018), made her the youngest author ever shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize-brings her nuanced sense of menace and intimate understanding of the perils of loving too much to this latest entry in her developing canon of dark places where the unspeakable speaks and speaks. A subtle book that brings to bear all its author's prodigious skill. A must-read.

A novel about family facing their darkest impulses while quarantined together? Highly relatable.

A brilliant portrayal of love and complex family relationships, with all the features of a Gothic mystery.

A lushly written, psychologically suspenseful narrative that's not easily forgotten.

A darkly disquieting thriller... The descriptions are vivid enough to stop you in your tracks, and the narrative draws to a psychologically apt conclusion.

A multi-dimensional shocker, where everything is not as clear cut as it initially seems, leading to a devastating conclusion. Fans of the darker and more mysteriously menacing work of Stephen King or the contemporary horror of Andrew Michael Hurley will adore Sisters.

Johnson has cultivated a striking style with recurring images and themes... [her] stories contain minimal dialogue and very little straightforward narration. They are instead characterised by the accumulation of sensory detail, the gradual revealing of character, and a building sense of dread.

Johnson pulls off a great feat in this book. We are propelled by her story, even while we barely know what it is; absorbed by characters at once abstract yet fully drawn. She allows just enough clarity to pierce through, like flashes of an image amid white noise, until finally we can grasp and appreciate the whole picture that has so thrillingly eluded us.

Sisters echoes Brontë's Wuthering Heights not only in its gothic elements and sombre descriptions of English landscapes but also in the idea of doomed love, love which becomes an omnipotent, harmful power... Sisters is chilling and unrestful in a way many horror stories aren't, the world of the novel itself a disturbing and anxious place.

An absorbing tale of sibling love and envy.

It's hard to deny the uncanny thrill generated by Johnson's blend of horror, nature writing and magical realism... As dazzling as a photographer's flash.

*Now a major film SEPTEMBER SAYS* 
 
The electrifying novel from the Booker shortlisted author of Everything Under. 
 
'A short sharp explosion of a gothic thriller' Observer 
 
Something unspeakable has happened to sisters July and September. 
 
Desperate for a fresh start, they move across the country to an old family house that has a troubled life of its own. Noises come from behind the walls. Lights flicker of their own accord. Sleep feels impossible, dreams are endless. 
 
In their new, unsettling surroundings, July finds that the fierce bond she's always had with September - forged with a blood promise when they were children - is beginning to change in ways she cannot understand.

A BBC Radio 4 drama collection

The Hotel: A Series of ghost stories with a feminist twist

Fifteen highly original and darkly unsettling supernatural stories, performed by some of Britain's finest actresses 
 
'This is what we know about The Hotel. It is bigger on the inside than on the outside. Do not go into Room 63. Doors and windows do not stay in the same places. The Hotel listens when you speak. The Hotel watches... We'll be at The Hotel soon.' 
 
A place of myths, rumours and secrets, The Hotel looms over the dark Fens, tall and grey in its Gothic splendour. Built on cursed land, a history of violent death suffuses its very foundations - yet it has a magnetism that is impossible to ignore. 
 
On entering The Hotel, different people react in different ways. To some it is familiar, to others a stranger. Many come out refreshed, longing to return. But a few are changed forever, haunted by their time there. And almost all those affected are women... 
 
Here are the stories of The Hotel: stories of children, mothers, monsters, cult film-makers, thrill-seekers and workers on the night shift, all with their own tales of its strange power, of the horrors of Room 63, and of desperate but failed attempts to escape its seductive pull. 
 
Included are: The Hotel (read by Sara Kestelman); The Witch (read by Nicola Walker), The Build (read by Maxine Peake); Infestation (read by Anne-Marie Duff); Clean (read by Ronke Adékoluejo); The Wedding (read by Alexandria Riley); Conference (read by Jessica Raine); The Monster (read by Bettrys Jones); Night Watch (read by Anne-Marie Duff); Briony (read by Adjoa Andoh); Haunted (read by Laurel Lefkow); Mother (read by Rebecca Root); The Story (read by Juliet Stevenson); The Priest (read by Barbara Flynn) and The Film (read by Sara Kestelman). 
 
Written by Daisy Johnson, one of Britain's best contemporary novelists and the youngest ever to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize, these deliciously chilling ghost stories will linger in your mind long after hearing. 
 
Production credits 
Written by Daisy Johnson 
Produced by Justine Willett 
 
 
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 20 September-27 December 2020 
 
©2020 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd (P)2020 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd

Fifteen highly original and darkly unsettling supernatural stories, performed by some of Britain's finest actresses 
 
'This is what we know about The Hotel. It is bigger on the inside than on the outside. Do not go into Room 63. Doors and windows do not stay in the same places. The Hotel listens when you speak. The Hotel watches... We'll be at The Hotel soon.' 
 
A place of myths, rumours and secrets, The Hotel looms over the dark Fens, tall and grey in its Gothic splendour. Built on cursed land, a history of violent death suffuses its very foundations - yet it has a magnetism that is impossible to ignore. 
 
On entering The Hotel, different people react in different ways. To some it is familiar, to others a stranger. Many come out refreshed, longing to return. But a few are changed forever, haunted by their time there. And almost all those affected are women... 
 
Here are the stories of The Hotel: stories of children, mothers, monsters, cult film-makers, thrill-seekers and workers on the night shift, all with their own tales of its strange power, of the horrors of Room 63, and of desperate but failed attempts to escape its seductive pull. 
 
Included are: The Hotel (read by Sara Kestelman); The Witch (read by Nicola Walker), The Build (read by Maxine Peake); Infestation (read by Anne-Marie Duff); Clean (read by Ronke Adékoluejo); The Wedding (read by Alexandria Riley); Conference (read by Jessica Raine); The Monster (read by Bettrys Jones); Night Watch (read by Anne-Marie Duff); Briony (read by Adjoa Andoh); Haunted (read by Laurel Lefkow); Mother (read by Rebecca Root); The Story (read by Juliet Stevenson); The Priest (read by Barbara Flynn) and The Film (read by Sara Kestelman). 
 
Written by Daisy Johnson, one of Britain's best contemporary novelists and the youngest ever to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize, these deliciously chilling ghost stories will linger in your mind long after hearing. 
 
Production credits 
Written by Daisy Johnson 
Produced by Justine Willett 
 
 
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 20 September-27 December 2020 
 
©2020 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd (P)2020 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd

Welcome to the Fen – a landscape of dark magic and desire, conjured by a fierce new voice in British fiction.

Daisy Johnson’s story collection Fen was unanimously beloved... firmly situating her among the UK’s most exciting new voices.

Just finished rereading Daisy Johnson’s story collection Fen. Just as powerful and beautiful and dark and strange as the first time. One of my favourite books of all time.

Johnson's heady broth of folklore, female sexuality and fenland landscape reads like a mix of Graham Swift and Angela Carter… For atmosphere, originality and plain chutzpah, this is an impressive first collection.

Poetic, risky… Johnson’s slippery and sensual stories-cum-chapters have an amphibious elemental quality and a contemporary provincial witchiness of their own.

There is big, dangerous vitality herein - this book marks the emergence of a great, stomping, wall-knocking talent.

Reading the stories brought the sense of being trapped in a room slowly, but very surely, filling up with water. You think: this can't be happening. Meanwhile, hold your breath against the certainty it surely is.

Within these magical, ingenious stories lies all of the angst, horror and beauty of adolescence. A brilliant achievement.

In a year that made me furious, Daisy Johnson’s Fen was a howl I didn’t know I needed. [...] It’s hauntingly written and full of unabashedly, refreshingly angry women who are hungry — both figuratively and literally — for things long denied them.

[A] remarkable debut… Johnson’s well-judged narrative distance and her fine use of language…help to transform the familiar, the domestic, the provincial into something terribly beautiful.

[A] startling and inventive debut… The stories in Fen invest familiar scenarios with fresh energy.

Johnson is possessed of the rare ability to trust in the power of language, and this allows her to trust in the force and the fecundity of her voice… An assembly of imaginings that linger in the mind as dark miracles and shadowed celebrations, and as intensely resonant reckonings with our hidden ways of being.

Johnson’s excellent debut is set in the precarious and artificial landscape of the East Anglian fens… Fen has been compared to the stories of Angela Carter, but for me it recalls the poetry of Robin Robertson.

Strange, half-magical short stories…I’ve had my eye on it for weeks.

I've been working my way slowly through Fen and not wanting it to end - Daisy marries realism to the uncanny so well that the strangest turnings ring as truth. The echoes between stories give the collection a wonderfully satisfying cohesion, so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I cannot wait to see what she does next.

Dark magical realism meets incisive social critique and deep-sea psychological diving in this arresting short- story collection… Atmosphere is the driving force in these stories, imbued with the damp, liminal qualities of their setting, and expressed through sensual, elemental descriptions of land, water and skies… [An] outstanding and unforgettable debut.

With more than a passing nod to Graham Swift’s Waterland, Fen weaves together the gothic magical realism, and fairytale. The best of them have real power… Fen is an ambitious first collection that marks out Daisy Johnson as a writer to watch.

Vivid and unsettling. Johnson’s brilliant short stories will haunt and taunt you.

Fen is uncanny and fantastic: it will be really exciting to see what Johnson does next.

An absorbing read, blending dark magical realism and social critique… The stories are made memorable by their uncanny imagery and the rich originality of the language. But a strongly conjured atmosphere is the driving force, with the damp, liminal qualities of the setting seeping into every aspect of the narratives. A brilliant debut.

Tremendously strange short stories but they stay with you.

A strange, fantastical squelch through watery East Anglia...one of the most impressive collections of short stories in recent years

Revisit the haunting debut short story collection from the Booker-shortlisted author of Everything Under. 
 
'Full of unabashedly, refreshingly angry women... In a year that made me furious, Daisy Johnson’s Fen was a howl I didn’t know I needed' Celeste Ng 
 
 
The Fen is a liminal land. Real people live their lives here. They wrestle with sex and desire, with everyday routine. But the wild is always close at hand, ready to erupt. 
 
This is a place where animals and people commingle and fuse, where curious metamorphoses take place, where myth and dark magic still linger. So here a teenager may starve herself into the shape of an eel. A house might fall in love with a girl. A woman might give birth to a, well, what? 
 
 
'Instant classic...a bold, take-no-prisoners collection situated somewhere between Angela Carter and Deborah Levy' Jeff VanderMeer

Long Wave

A hypnotic and haunting work of fiction about losing yourself and finding your family, Long Wave is the finest novel yet from Booker Prize-shortlisted Daisy Johnson 
 
Close to the shore is the island: uninhabited, wild, with only a storm-beaten lighthouse for shelter. Ori was found there as a small child with a handful of stones, no memories and no mother. When she has a baby of her own, the job of motherhood feels immense and sleepless nights begin to shatter her grip on reality. Her head fills with the sound of stones knocking against each other and the mystery of her past begins to unravel, opening a path to the mother she lost, and the mother she could become. 
 
Years earlier, on a sweltering summer day, ten-year-old Ruth sees a woman and her baby walk into the river and disappear. But she is the only witness, and the water yields no trace. Ruth’s mother, Edith, locks her daughter away – first to restrain these wild imaginings, and later, when she falls pregnant, to hide the shame. Ruth longs to escape and dreams of the nearby island, where she and her baby can finally be free. 
 
Told with mythic power and lyrical precision, Long Wave is an extraordinary novel of longing and loss, rebirth and survival.

Daisy Johnson

The British literary heir to Stephen King ... crammed with mesmerising images

As splendidly written as it is haunting

Daisy Johnson is the demon offspring of Shirley Jackson and Stephen King

The Hotel… [is] as haunting as many a British ghost story

In The Hotel, Johnson has given us a deftly constructed new version of a horror collection, with stories that slip in like mist under the door, just right for Halloween. But like all the best horror stories, they have deep roots. Like The Hotel itself, they are haunted

The Hotel is…striking: it should be read at night, with the lights low, in one sitting

Sisters is a gothic masterpiece... Confirms Johnson as a profoundly inventive and masterful storyteller

Surprising, gorgeously written and profoundly unsettling, Everything Under will sink into your bones and stay there

Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House

Daisy Johnson is a new goddamn swaggering monster of fiction

The stories Daisy Johnson tells are at once heart-rending and hair-raising. Her prose is elegantly emotional; her plotting would make Shirley Jackson, a master of upmarket horror, proud

Everything Under is weird and wild and wonderfully unsettling. Daisy Johnson writes in a torrent of language as unrelenting and turbulent and dark as the river at the book’s heart; dive in for just a moment and you’ll emerge gasping and haunted

Celeste Ng, author Little Fires Everywhere

There are few writers as talented as Daisy. After reading Sisters, I binged on Fen and Everything Under and am now obsessed

Daisy Johnson is one of the best writers in this country... An astonishing stylist

To read Daisy Johnson is to have that rare feeling of meeting an author you’ll read for the rest of your life

Evie Wyld, author of All the Birds, Singing

Lovers of horror will devour this book and I hope literary fiction fans will be tempted outside of their comfort zone. The contemporary literary scene would be a poorer place without Daisy Johnson around

A triumph of contemporary horror from the Booker Prize-shortlisted author, this collection of short stories will haunt you long after you turn the final page

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 during the depths of Covid lockdown, the collection is fittingly suffocating

There are several standouts in this strong collection… It is touching, unsettling and brilliantly controlled

A place of myths, rumours and secrets, The Hotel looms over the dark Fens, tall and grey in its Gothic splendour. Built on cursed land, a history of violent death suffuses its very foundations –yet it has a magnetism that is impossible to ignore. 
 
On entering The Hotel, different people react in different ways. To some it is familiar, to others a stranger. Many come out refreshed, longing to return. But a few are changed forever, haunted by their time there. And almost all those affected are women... 
 
They are children and mothers, monsters, cult film-makers, thrill-seekers and workers on the night shift, all with their own tales of its strange power, of the horrors of Room 63, and of desperate but failed attempts to escape its seductive pull.

The Hotel

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Daisy Johnson

Praise for The Hotel

The British literary heir to Stephen King ... crammed with mesmerising images

As splendidly written as it is haunting

Brilliantly chilling

The British literary heir to Stephen King ... crammed with mesmerising images

As splendidly written as it is haunting

Brilliantly chilling

The British literary heir to Stephen King ... crammed with mesmerising images

As splendidly written as it is haunting

Brilliantly chilling

Books by Daisy Johnson

Articles featuring Daisy Johnson

Books we’d recommend to Jane Austen’s best characters

The best horror stories told in novels, ranked from scary to terrifying

Siren call: How fiction reclaimed the mermaid’s tale

Witches, ghosts and feminism: how female authors are rewriting horror fiction

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