True Crime & Smuggling Snails: Alice Slater & Heather Parry in conversation

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Heather Parry is the acclaimed author of Orpheus Builds a Girl and the upcoming This Is My Body, Given For You. Alice Slater's highly anticipated debut Death of a Bookseller novel is out tomorrow (27 April), with a full interview Alice here or in our April issue. We put the two authors (and pals!) into a shared Google Doc for a deep dive into Slater's new novel, the glory to be found unlikeable characters, and why they are both drawn to gross fiction.

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Heather Parry: Hi Alice! What a treat to get to talk to you about your ‘horrible little book’ via the magical medium of Google Docs.

Alice Slater: Hello, this is fun and weird. Can you see me typing and deleting?

I can; it’s like I’m a hacker from 90s classic movie Hackers.

I’m reading everything I type and everything you type out loud, much like in beloved 90s TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer in which Willow falls in love with a demon trapped in a computer.

We’ve both showed our cultural touchstones so early in the conversation. Before we go off on a tangent, let me ask you: you often refer to Death of a Bookseller as a "horrible little book", and while I know this is a dark bit of fun, I also wonder what it means for you for the book to be "horrible". I sense you, like me, don’t see this as a negative term!

I do love horrible books – I love horrible things in general. I’m the kind of person who likes to turn over metaphorical rocks and see all the bugs and worms wriggling around in the dirt underneath, or like – if something smells weird, I turn into DI Slater and make it my mission to sniff it out. So no, I definitely don’t see it as a negative, more of a neutral descriptor for the macabre. What I mean by calling my specific book horrible – it’s because it’s full of gross shit. Weird smells and rot and death and bad behaviour.

I think it was beloved contemporary novelist Julia Armfield who described the book as being "sticky underfoot", which is a perfect summary. Does that sort of method come naturally to you, seeping your stories in the sounds, the smells, the stickiness? Or was it something about this story in particular that required it?

No, not necessarily actually! Death of a Bookseller has two narrators, and most of the nasty stuff is stitched into Roach’s point of view. It works as a vehicle to characterise her as a gross little freak, and brings a grungy energy to her sections that is the antithesis to Laura’s neat, rose-scented world.

You do separate those two vibes so well in the book. And that brings me to the idea of gross characters. I think we both push against the idea that characters should be likeable; we have both written characters that are vile in their own way. Do you think characters that aren’t likeable should still be relatable in some way?

Show me someone who only relates to likeable characters and I’ll show you a liar.

Or someone with absolutely no self-awareness.

Yes exactly! I like characters who intrigue and entertain me; I like characters who are kind of wild and surprising, and do things that make me scream. I don’t want to hang out in the real world with the people that populate the fiction I read, but that’s chill because fiction serves an entirely different purpose. I think it’s helpful to separate the idea of disliking a character as a literary device and the idea of disliking them ‘as a person’. I don’t like Joe Goldberg (from You by Caroline Kepnes) as a person, but he’s a hoot to hang out with on the page, right?

I had to Google who that was, but I sense we’re dangerously close to my soap-box issue of Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City, and how people can’t handle characters who are actually riddled with vices and very normal human characteristics like periodic selfishness.

They do say all literary roads lead to Carrie Bradshaw.

All my conversations do, at least. But we’re getting into something now – you said fiction services an entirely different purpose. What is that purpose? I suspect you stand against the idea that fiction should be some sort of blueprint for morality.

Oh man, you can’t ask me such philosophical questions at 4pm on a Wednesday, this is proper Friday night, three-glasses-in territory. Seriously though, that’s absolutely how I feel: I have this bone-tired ennui over the moral panic surrounding depiction vs. endorsement in literature. For example, you can’t write about violence without depicting violence, right?

Agreed, and from my perspective at least, it’s important that fiction speaks to and about the faults in the world; I love the quote from J. G. Ballard in which he says he wants to provoke the reader. I really feel that fiction should be provocative. And that means showing and dissecting violence, and violent structures, and showing the things that people sometimes don’t want to acknowledge.

Yes exactly – and I think it’s so patronising to the reader to imagine that every action will be read without thought or critique, that reading is a passive act.

I hate being patronised as a reader; I’d rather be bored or angered by a book than feel patronised by it, and when it happens I always feel that it’s a missed opportunity too - like there’s a much more interesting conversation that could be happening.

I think it’s also about the drama of it all – sometimes, the most interesting tension comes from dark places, places that I wouldn’t like to find myself haunting in the real world.

This conversation keeps bringing to mind a line of argument put forward by several characters in Death of a Bookseller: that true crime is just about the exploitation of women, that people who like true crime are just revelling in violence against women. But I suspect you want your readers to critique that position too?

Hmm. It’s not so much that I’m asking the reader to critique that position, more that I’m asking the reader to join me while I think about it. I don’t think of this book as a thesis with a strong moral conclusion, and I hope true crime fans will see a little of themselves in both Roach and Laura. Because after all, Laura may not think of herself as a true crime “fan”, but she does both read and write in that space. Shades of grey, innit.

I feel like I can hear the Skinny’s lawyers reacting viscerally to a reference to that franchise [apologies to the legal team.]

I wanted to cross it out for a laugh but I can’t work Google Docs.

Strangely our books cover a lot of the same ground despite being very different. Mine, though fictional, takes inspiration from a real (and tragic and violent) story, whereas your book explores our obsession with true crime – and the moral elements of this – through its narrative. Did you feel that you were walking a thin line, when you were writing? It’s so easy for people to misinterpret intent.

I did – I questioned myself constantly. I was most concerned with whether or not referencing real serial killers in the work was an acceptable thing to do, which might strike you as odd considering how much media – literature, films, television shows – reference these people either intrinsically or in passing. Did you struggle with that too? Obviously your concept for Orpheus Builds a Girl is directly linked to a specific case, but you obscured the details, right?

It is definitely a question you have to raise with yourself again and again while writing this kind of book, I think. You have to be your own interrogator, to constantly look at where the line is and might be. In Orpheus Builds a Girl the inspiration was as much the real world’s real reaction to the case as much as the case itself, so it intends, really, to be a critique of how society responds to violence according to who is doing it. Which I think is maybe where our books overlap?

Yes exactly. In the end, I chose to reference a small number of real high profile cases alongside my fictional serial killer because I felt my point about elevating serial killers to celebrity status would be diluted if every example in the book was a work of fiction. I worried the whole thing could end up feeling hammy, like I had exaggerated true crime fans and their strange and disturbing online "fandoms" for the sake of the plot. Does that make sense?

Absolutely. There needs to be a sharp edge to these stories, so you can’t just bat them away. Having worked through this conversation, and invited the reader to work through it with you, do you think you’ve exhausted your interest in the topic? Will we be getting Death of a Bookseller: 2 Books 2 Furious, or will your next project be entirely different?

Nah, we’ll be waving a fond farewell to those famous chums of yore and doing something new next (this is a dorky The Secret History deep cut). Book 2 is a companion piece of sorts though – a character-driven thriller that’s wading through a sticky, polarising contemporary interest. With less snails.

Dammit Alice we want MORE snail content.

You aren’t the boss of me.

I just want you to end up like Patricia Highsmith, snails in your handbag at dinner parties, sneaking them through the French border in your bra.

Listen Heather, we all want to end up like Patricia Highsmith with the snails and the off-putting aura, but I genuinely don’t think I could bear the tender touch of a snail rawdogging my bare skin. Absolutely not. Can I say "rawdogging" in The Skinny?

We make the rules, and I say yes. And on that note…. Alice, it’s been an absolute pleasure.

I feel like this has been a real meeting of minds. Thank you so much <3

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Death of a Bookseller is out with Hodder & Stoughton on 27 April; This Is My Body, Given For You is out with Haunt Publishing on 11 May

Alice Slater will be in conversation with Kirsty Logan to launch Death of a Bookseller at The Portobello Bookshop on 2 May