It’s just another grim and grimy summer in the small Scottish town of Pitlaw when a thrillingly deviant funfair pitches its tents at the town’s edge. It doesn’t take long for the neon charms and colorful company of the Freakslaw, which includes a contortionist witch and her fortune teller mother, a luxuriously sensual fat lady, and a variety of self-professed gender pests and agents of chaos, to begin working on the repressed town’s residents. The menfolk are dangerously riled and the teenagers seduced. The funfair works like one of its own warped mirrors, offering the townsfolk alternate visions of themselves: studious Ruth sees a future beyond the straight path to university, bi-curious Derek glimpses freedom from his violent father.

Not quite a horror or a fantasy novel, Jane Flett’s debut Freakslaw is delightfully dark and experimental, a celebration of the wild pleasures of living in the world and in every variety of human body. Populated by a dazzling cast of characters, the book delves into group dynamics and social mores, community and mass hysteria. In a deeply satisfying build of sex, violence, and mayhem, the novel descends into a kind of spiritual war between our animal—perhaps even magical—natures and the strictures placed upon them by society and the self. 

I spoke with Flett in Berlin about witches, performance, and escape, and why we feel so bad about feeling good, and how good being bad can feel.

Olivia Parkes: What draws you aesthetically and emotionally to the funfair or amusement park? Why did you start there?

Jane Flett: Funfairs are purely based around the idea of pleasure. It’s right there in the name: fun. I love the idea that engineers and performers have worked together to make these rides that fly your body through the air and to give you overloaded sensorial experiences that bring joy or excitement. Entertainment, in that sense, is deeply wonderful to me, and is something I’ve always been drawn to. I become such a child in the space of the funfair, the colors and the neon, the brightness and movement, a giddy, joyful creature, dragging all of my friends to go on terrifying rides until they throw up. I understood over the course of writing the book that this was also about Scotland and the past, and my relationship to it. The amusement park seemed like such a perfect and explicit foil to this lingering Calvinist dourness that I grew up with, to the promotion of suffering as a moral good. It’s a space where instead pleasure and hedonism are explicit aims. 

OP: You grew up in a small Scottish town and have lived now for many years in Berlin, a famously queer city in which communities play a major role. Freakslaw is a story of a clash between worlds. It’s not focused on its individual characters in the way we’ve come to expect from the novel. What made you want to write that kind of story?

JF: I’m deeply interested in group dynamics and in community, which I think aren’t explored enough in novels. I’m fascinated by how groups operate as places for people to find release and family and community, as well as in how group dynamics can work in the direction of mass hysteria: the ways in which ideas and mentalities can become contagious once you’re within the group. Of course, Berlin is really wonderful in being a kind of queer, magical wonderland, but I had some experience of this already in Scotland, when I first moved to Edinburgh, the big city. I got very involved in arts organizations there, in particular with the Forest Cafe, an alternative space where we ran lots of free events in literature, art, and music. I remember this feeling in my early twenties, of finding these other weirdos who also wanted to make a life around art. It’s being in a group of other people wanting the same thing that makes it feel like an option.

OP: The individual characters who are most important for the action of the book are in fact teenagers: Ruth and Derek from the town, Zed and Nancy from the carnival. What were the pleasures and opportunities of writing about that time of life?

JF: As a teenager, I was really interested in the idea of escape. It was the time when I personally felt the most trapped in my life, but also had the most imagination, a wideness of ideas, a sense of how things might be otherwise. This combination of a total lack of agency while being hyper aware of other possibilities is really interesting to me. I was listening to all of the punk music and reading all of the novels, but at the same time I had very little of my own money and was living with my parents in a small town. The gap between the life I wanted to be living and the life that was in fact living was larger than it has been at any other point in my life. And in some ways, that’s really exciting. I wanted to capture the feeling of the last summer before you leave school and everything is building up to this fever pitch. That feeling of pressure really increased what I was able to do with these teenage characters. There are a lot of external factors keeping them where they are, but at the same time, these rich internal feelings of opportunity, the sense that everything is about to be cracked open. 

OP: The book is set in the late ’90s, when you yourself were a teen. It made me reflect on the ways in which the discussion now around gender identity and queerness is fairly different, but many of the social issues we’ve faced in those areas haven’t progressed much over 30 years. Why did you position the story in that time? 

JF: On a practical level, there are so many more opportunities for stories when you don’t have phones. The way in which fate unfolds when you can’t contact people is completely different: you showed up at this place, you ran into this person. I didn’t realize this until after I wrote the book, but 1997, the year the action takes place, was a really interesting year in the U.K. It was the year Diana died, and the year that Labour won this massive landslide election and came into power, and there was this real sense of Britain under a force of change, as well as this pressure cooker of grief and emotion. And ultimately it led to nothing. I think that was also subconsciously behind that choice. That ‘97 is this year of potential and change and contains this hopefulness for something different, but also the pressure of everything remaining the same. Also, I wanted it to be 400 years since one of the great witchcraft panics in the northeast of Scotland, which was in 1597.

OP: I also felt that the kind of grimy, post-Thatcher vibe worked really well in conjuring the contrast between this small northern town and the colorful Freakslaw. The Freakslaw carnival does in fact center some “classic” freak show acts: you’ve got the pin girl, and Werewolf Louie, a man with hirsutism; you’ve got conjoined twins, and the fat lady, along with various types of queerness and otherness. The book gives us this joyful embrace of, to use its own term, freakery, but there is of course a real history of freak shows to contend with, which profited on the spectacle of other bodies. What tropes were you conscious of working with and against?

JF: That celebration was really the biggest thing that I wanted to come through. I can’t speak for physical disability or some of the other identities within the freak show depicted here, but it started for me from the point of queerness. For such a long time, queer literature occupied the position that being gay is awful and a thing of great suffering: You come out, and it’s the worst thing that’s ever happened. You admit your terrible defect to the world and are rejected for it. There’s the undergirding assumption that obviously you would be heterosexual if you could. And that’s just so far from the reality of the queer people I know. Queerness is the thing that has brought me all the joy and all the good things and all the good people. And I wanted to have that sense in the book, but also to have it around other forms of difference that have been considered to be “defects” or difficulties that imposed suffering. At no point do any of these characters say: Oh, I wish I was more normal. 

I was also thinking a lot about the idea of performance and entertainment, and where the power is held in that dynamic: A performer does something for an audience, gives them something. In the inherited ideas around freak shows that can be seen as a disempowering act: You are a spectacle to be looked at, and people take something from you by looking at you. I was really trying to separate those ideas, to say that by putting yourself forward without shame, saying, this is me, and this otherness is the source of my power, my brilliance. You may come and you may give me your money, and I am getting something from you. I wanted to write a story that put the power into the hands of the performers, who are also like a family and who share and reinforce that power for each other.

OP: We haven’t talked about witches. One of the most unforgettable characters in the book is Nancy, a teen contortionist witch. She’s in some ways quite an ambivalent character, boundary pushing almost to the point of nihilism, but full of passion. We also discover that the town of Pitlaw has a history of burning witches. 

JF: I’m glad you brought up Nancy, because she is my favorite. I find that a lot of readers don’t like her, or they really love her. I’m fascinated by the way people judge books based on whether or not they like the main character, on that as a metric for literary merit. I mean I’ve had reviews in a major Scottish newspaper saying, well, this book is terrible, because this person, this character, Nancy, is bad, and she doesn’t learn any lessons.

OP: I would hate for Nancy to learn anything! 

JF: I’m very drawn to “misbehavior,” to characters that don’t have to be good, characters who make up their own rules, especially when those rules are kind of chaotic. I wish I could embody Nancy’s total chaotic energy. And thinking about witches—that for me comes back to power and agency, and who holds it and who tries to take it away. Many “witches” were women with knowledge of herbal medicine, and they were persecuted because the power of medicine became questionable when it was in the hands of women. I’m also particularly interested in witchcraft in the context of Scotland, in that Scotland often views itself as this marginalized, maligned country who had terrible things done to it: We’re innocent, England did all the terrible things. But Scotland has a brutal history in terms of witchcraft—I think we killed like 15 times more people per capita than England did. 

OP: I was struck by the fact that while the story does contain these supernatural elements, they’re also kind of incidental. It’s not a fantasy book. At the heart, it’s a story about social mores and social power. I got the sense that the actual “magic” in the book is a natural force that people contain within themselves and can either repress or allow to flourish. How did you see the magic operating? 

JF: A bit like a Rorschach test, in that depending on where you’re coming from, you can see it either as a delusion or as a real phenomenon. There’s a scientific explanation for everything that happens in the book, and there are also levels of group hysteria. You can read Gloria, the fortune teller (and Nancy’s mother), as making up some weird ideas about what’s happening, or simply being more conscious of forces that aren’t visible but are present. I’m interested in places where these two kinds of belief come together. My own feeling is that they’re not so different. When you get down to the level of things happening in quantum mechanics, yeah, observation can change how an electron operates. If we’re saying that consciousness can change subatomic matter in the physical world, why then do you not believe that intentions can have an effect? I’m not really interested in magic as a fantastical force that comes in and solves or creates problems, but rather: what happens when people have focused intentions or different views of what even can happen? How can that push up against the world to create either chaos or transformation or both?

OP: Another big thread in this book is, I suppose, hedonism, but of a conscious kind: there’s a conscious embrace within the Freakslaw of desire in all its forms, as well as of ideas. There’s a sense in the book that some of the barriers placed on human freedom and experience are social, but some of them are self-imposed. How were you were thinking about the limits placed on pleasure?

JF: Embracing pleasure is not something that comes naturally to people in Scotland. We have a landscape of suffering and a history of valorizing that kind of suffering. That’s also something I feel in my own life. I can veer endlessly between hedonism and masochism and I’m really interested in those two aspects of sensation or behavior. I’m not really interested in comfort as a place to dwell: I would much rather go out for the long hike in the driving rain, and then come back soaked and sit by the pub fire and feel pleasure because the last thing was so bad. 

I wanted to write about the complicated fight that so many people seem to have with pleasure, the permission they need to feel it. There’s immense guilt attached to “pure” pleasure-seeking: Even if these activities don’t hurt anyone else, if they don’t have a secondary moral impact—they’re not doing something to “improve” ourselves or for the good of the world—then they’re bad. I have a strong belief in tending to our own pleasure and making life a pleasurable experience, that our own personal pleasures are not negligible. I’ve come to think that enjoying moments does in fact makes the world better, not least because we then have more capacity to take actions that make it so. 

OP: And there’s no pleasure without the body. The language around the body in this book is so varied and sticky and lushly weird and beautiful. Attention is drawn to all its difference and possibility as a carrier of pleasure, but also to its animal nature. What do you want to bring through in writing about the body?

JF: I’m always interested in disgust and desire and how they operate together. Disgust is so interesting to me, and the ways in which bodies are disgusting, and how that is key to the pleasure of them. I’m completely uninterested in the sanitized version of our bodies, how polished they’re supposed to be. I want instead to get into the sensation and the feeling, the open bits and the wet bits and the stuff that’s inside them that comes out of them.

OP: In some ways, this a very dark book: it’s a kind of horror story. But the sense I was left with, at the end, was of having read a romance. There’s also a lot of romance in it the book, and I mean true, sappy happy ending kind. What lingered for me were the love stories, Werewolf Louie and the local hairdresser, Derek and Zed. 

JF: Yeah, I love joy. I am such an essentially cheesy person, all the way down. When we talk about endings in the classes I teach, I’ll sometimes ask what kinds of endings people like, and many of them say: ambiguous ones that are a little bit sad. And I’m like, No. I want to end at this point of pure joy. I think especially talking about queer people, talking about marginalized people—I want there to be hope. I want there to be resistance and power and anger against injustice, but the fighting isn’t worth anything if you don’t have the positive vision that you build in the place of that fight, and what you build in place of it has to be based in joy. If the revolution and what comes after doesn’t include pleasure and happiness and happy endings and all the good stuff, then that doesn’t feel like the fight I want to be having.