Dear Reader,
Strange Beasts started with a fairytale. Bluebeard, to be exact. There are countless versions of the fairytale, and it’s been used in a variety of ways—a delve into a violent man’s psychosis, a metaphor for domestic violence, even as a warning against men’s supposed animal appetites and the dangers of premarital sex… But when I read it this time, I found myself drawn in not by what the story says about men’s violence, but about women’s strengths. How even her curiosity, positioned in the story as her fatal flaw—as if not knowing Bluebeard is a monster makes him any less of one—ends up being the very thing that allows her to save herself.
After all, the brothers didn’t uncover Bluebeard’s monstrosity and come to rescue her. His evil was invisible to them. She opened that door. What’s more, they were only able to rescue her because of the close relationships she’d nurtured with them, because she was clever enough to reach them without getting caught, and because her uncanny insight allowed her to manipulate him, buying time for them to arrive.
Charm, insight, and cleverness. These are feminine strengths, a concept that is all too often considered an oxymoron, but one in which I take a fierce pride and even joy in. And I found myself compelled by this secret, second story, hidden beneath the first—not about what a woman can’t do, but about how she does it anyway, despite all the rules and regulations trying to stop her.
Of course, these feminine strengths have a dark side. This soft power is born from necessity—because the alternative is to open Bluebeard’s door and die, or to live in the dark and pray the monster isn’t there, and we all know how effective that is. We are at our most charming when we are afraid—it’s a survival mechanism, well-honed by living in a patriarchal society. But beneath that fear is something else, something that feels almost dangerous: anger.
Anger that we have to come at things sideways, that we have to choose between being ourselves and being safe. That to deviate from any of society’s thousand rules of femininity—to be too pretty or not pretty enough, to have too much want or not enough want, to have too much rage (there is no such thing as not enough rage)—is to be deemed monstrous.
Which is actually where my title came from: Strange Beasts. Not just for the grindylows and werewolves, though it is for them. Not for the more metaphorical variety of monsters, the Professor Moriartys and highway brigands, though it’s for them as well. But for my leading ladies, Sam and Hel, for living in a society that tried to tell them who they were, and for daring to be themselves instead. Because in a Society that tells us that any deviation is monstrous, sometimes the monster is you.
Thank you so much for your support of this glorious edition of Strange Beasts. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
All the best,
Susan
