The Cat Bride

‘A stunningly evocative, beautifully written gothic novel drawing on myths and fairytales in a devastating depiction of psychological and visceral horrors.’ —Lisa Tuttle, The Guardian

‘This debut novel establishes Tierney as a bold new voice in literary horror.’ —Gingernuts of Horror

The heatwave of 1995. Sixteen years since an infamous tiger-lynx hybrid escaped a small moorland zoo and ate someone. Sixteen years since the animal was euthanised. Sixteen years for the zoo to fall into disrepair.

Then sixteen-year-old convalescent Lowdy, and her Mumma, are forced to move to the remote old zoo to care for her dying grandmother, and rumours of the animal stalking the moors resurface. Vengeful locals blame the three women for the predator on the loose. Mumma insists all the cats are dead. Grandma whispers that the ‘tynx’ needs to be fed. Lowdy, still recovering from her own mysterious illness, begins to wonder who she can trust. Can she even trust herself when she wakes up covered in ticks with no recollection of the night before?

As Lowdy searches for the truth – the truth of her childhood, what it means to be a woman, and the truth about the cats – she realises something feral runs in the blood, something she cannot ignore.

Much more than simply the wry horror of a young woman’s beastly metamorphosis, The Cat Bride views the eerie liminality of teenaged girls through a pastoral gothic fug of lairy nineties lads, booze and fags.