The Making of Step-Sisters: An Introduction

I wanted to write this book ever since I walked out of Guillermo Del Toro's The Shape of Water and wanted to do my own Cold War horror fairytale. Whereas that film was The Beauty and the Beast, this was Cinderella. Whereas that film was The Cuban Missile Crisis, this was more about the messy origins of the Cold War after WWII leading into McCarthyism. By this point, you're probably sensing I'm more influenced by cinema than literature. GUILTY! And yet the writing style here was a very conscious attempt to do an Angela Carter thing. I love the opening of Wise Children, how excited it is to be a novel and back in the past, marvelling at itself and an era of bygone history, and that's what the first chapter of this book is about. Big Horror Fans will also note references to James Whale's Frankenstein and Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In fact, I rip off entire sequences from those great films; I love them so much. I'll go into this in detail.

There is an entire cut third act of this novel I plan to turn into a sequel.