Literary power couple Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta are back after the success of their romantic-comedy debut The View Was Exhausting. Their sophomore novel, Feast While You Can, is a queer horror story that is as sexy as it is scary. Protagonist Angelina has two big problems: the first is the simple fact of her brother’s ex-girlfriend Jagvi, who is simultaneously the only other lesbian and the only other brown person that she knows in their small, rural Italian town. The second is that she has accidentally become possessed by an ancient demon that lives in the local cave system.
Equal parts strange, grotesque and erotic, Feast While You Can is the perfect Halloween read to sink your teeth into. Ahead of the novel’s release, we speak to both authors about the influences on their novel, their writing process and what a supernatural entity can tell us about our sexuality.
First things first: what is it like to write as a duo, especially as a couple?
Mikaella Clements: It’s really good. We’ve been together for 12 years, and we’ve been writing together for pretty much the entire time. We were long-distance for a long time, and so we would pass stories back and forth in our emails – because that’s a lot more interesting than the other long-distance questions like ‘what did you do today’ or ‘how was work’?
Onjuli Datta: The good thing about that is, it means that both of us are fairly unprecious about edits overall. Whenever we get to the stage where we’re working with an editor, or even getting feedback from a friend, we’re generally pretty open because we’re used to bouncing things back and forth all the time. It makes it feel like a much more free and collaborative thing to do.
Mikaella Clements: We met when we were young and we started writing together when we were young. Our styles really grew up entwined around each other, and it’s very easy to step into the voice that we use to write together, which is why people generally can’t tell that it’s two authors from the actual text itself. We edit back and forth so much – I think every single scene in that novel has been rewritten and then re-edited so many times that we often say, if you open up the book and read out a line, we would not be able to say which of us had written it. Some couples renovate houses and some raise children – we gossip about people we made up!
What made you want to depart from romance and write a horror novel?
Mikaella Clements: We always knew we were never going to write the same book every time. There are some authors who have a niche and execute that niche extremely well. But we like too many genres! We’re both really interested in the structures and beats of different genres. The View was an ode to rom-coms, and we played those beats very seriously.
Onjuli Datta: In Feast we do the same thing with horror. I’ve spent several years reading a lot of horror novels, and thinking a lot about the genre.
Mikaella Clements: That’s what we want to continue to do as well. With Feast, I really liked thinking about the ways that romance and horror can overlap, and we wanted to keep some of the things that we practised with The View. Onj is a massive horror fan: she’ll watch horror movies when she’s hungover as a comfort thing. I was an extreme baby about horror until I met Onj, and even for the first eight years of our relationship I watched it and read under extreme duress. But the way that she talked about it as a genre and its theory, and the way it takes these major shifts over the decades – it started to really interest me, and so I thought, let’s write a love letter to this genre that you love so much, and for me it can be a bit of a dare. I had to go into this genre that felt like, maybe it wasn’t my home, and carve out a space. There’s a sense of deep love and deep familiarity from Onj, and a curiosity and trepidation from me. And genuine fear.
Where do you think horror as a genre is now?
Onjuli Datta: The most exciting thing for me about horror right now is how queer it is, and how much it has become a queer space in literature. That’s not to say that only queer people can write it, but I just think that there has been this explosion in the last few years of queer writers, and especially lesbian writers, doing horror in a way that’s really exciting. You have the major players like Julia Armfield, who does incredible lyrical writing, and then writers like Jane Flett who write the novel Freakslaw, which came out this year. It’s really weird, and so camp. There’s also Carmen Maria Machado and Alison Rumfitt – there’s so many! Often, all of these people are writing about nasty things, but I do feel like the overall energy you get in that space is joy, and thrills. It’s kind of like a celebration, both of the genre, and of turning pain into something fun and beautiful. There’s something very camp about that.
I just think that there has been this explosion in the last few years of queer writers, and especially lesbian writers, doing horror in a way that’s really exciting
Mikaella Clements: If you look at 80s and 90s horror films, there is also something very camp about it, and there were a lot of queer actors and queer characters. But, obviously, they were the villains, and there is a deep sense of queerness as threatening and monstrous. When horror shifted and it was suddenly like, ‘oh, we can’t do that anymore’ because it was the early 2000s and everyone was pretending to be PC, even though they definitely weren’t. But now you have queer people writing and telling these stories, and being the ones who get to come up with it. Now it’s by us and for us.
Onjuli Datta: But it is also nice to go back and watch a movie with a queer villain or read a book with a queer villain and be like, I love that, they’re my favourite character, hope they win!
To talk about the novel specifically, what made you want to set it in rural Italy?
Onjuli Datta: We did a bunch of thinking and research, and we bought folklore books from so many different places and cultures. We were reading them all, asking which one resonates the most, while also researching different locations. And two things came up – firstly, we were looking for cave systems in Europe that we could visit, and we found this cave system in a town called Matera, in Italy. We went and visited just after lockdown ended in November, and it was really dark and cold but really beautiful. There’s a massive ravine that runs through the town and it’s one of the last places in Europe where people still live in caves. The other thing was that we were reading Italian folklore by Italo Calvino. He has a sense of humour in his writing that really spoke to the type of horror that we wanted to do.
Mikaella Clements: Earlier drafts of the novel were a lot more vague, and we did keep some of those elements. So maybe it does have a bit of America in it, a bit of Australia in it, maybe a British element to it as well. There’s still something removed about it, we didn’t want it to feel too specific because we wanted the setting to be a bit discomforting and disjointing. We wanted our readers to feel a little bit off balance, like they had taken a step and missed.
The novel also seems a little bit out of time – although I would guess it is set in the 90s?
Mikaella Clements: We were reading a lot of lesbian anthologies like The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader, which is really wonderful and was published in 1992, and another one called Coming to Power, which is about BDSM lesbian relationships and was published in 1982. They were interesting because they’re very distinctly different to the way we conceive of lesbianism today. There’s something deeply compelling and moving about it, like these are my people, my ancestors. There is a swagger, and bravery and a kind of toothiness to them, which is obviously still very present in queer communities. But I love how present it is in those anthologies, and so the time period of the book, which I see as being sort of the 90s, is a tribute to that.
Onjuli Datta: There is also an Instagram page called On Your Knees that compiles a lot of nineties lesbian photography. That was a big input for our mood boards while we were writing as well.
Can you talk about your choice in monster? There are a lot of different directions you could have gone in, but you went in quite a spiritual direction.
Onjuli Datta: We knew that we wanted it to be a possession novel, because it’s the sexiest of the horror tropes and we wanted to write a sexy novel. It also made sense for the type of love story that we wanted to write as well. But to be honest, the big inspiration for the monster was being in lockdown and being really depressed, and having this permanent voice in your head telling you really horrible things. The novel imagines that voice as something else, and in some ways that’s kind of nice to imagine your depression as coming from elsewhere. So maybe it was a bit of an escape fantasy in that sense.
Mikaella Clements: We were really surprised at how chatty it was. It was this thing that had a lot of stuff to say, and it’s more frightening because of that.
Onjuli Datta: Although, there is this scene where the monster is talking to Angelina while she’s trying to work and Mik started to write the dialogue for it. And I read it and thought, this monster is kind of hot. And that was a really fun realisation!
Mikaella Clements: The other thing about the monster is it’s very revealing about your sexuality. The monster has no gender because it’s an ancient supernatural demon, and when people have written feedback, they usually assign it the pronoun of the gender they’re attracted to.
Feast While You Can is published by Simon & Schuster and out October 24.
