Our book of the month for November, with 30% off, is Licorice by Bridget Penney

Chalk, gorse, old coppice, redundant dew ponds, a crossroads formed by the intersection of a B road and an ancient fisherman’s track. It’s August. The rain shows no sign of stopping. Licorice, a reclusive middle-aged filmmaker, has only a brief window of opportunity to realise her long-cherished film project about the story of Nan Kemp. A grisly story of infanticide, cannibalism and rough justice remembered on the map: local kids have dared and scared each other to run round ‘the witch’s grave’ since way back when. The rebuilt windmill provides a hypothetical link between the time from which Nan’s ‘story’ springs and the present. The idea of folk horror and well-worn tropes lifted from films such as The Mask of Satan, The Blair Witch Project and Irma Vep give this narrative about failing to create a narrative its shape.

Bridget Penney is a writer based in Brighton. Her previous books are Honeymoon with Death and Other Stories (1991), and Index, published by Book Works (2008, 2nd edition, 2015) as the opening entry in the Semina series of experimental novels, guest edited by Stewart Home. Licorice (2020) is the first book in our Interstices series, the second title in the series Other Reflexes by Diana Georgiou is available to pre-order now.