What happens when a centuries-old river monster meets a human she desperately wants to eat — only to find herself falling in love with him instead?
Gillian Daniels’ debut horror novel Jenny Will Eat You Now revolves around Jenny Greenteeth, a centuries-old river dweller who has made her home beneath the streets of Boston and regards humans with a mixture of contempt and appetite. But then she meets a handsome academic and, for reasons she doesn’t entirely understand, finds herself slightly more intrigued than hungry.
Romance, body horror and folklore collide with gloriously impolite results in Jenny Will Eat You Now, which turns the conventional monster story on its head and then cheerfully bites into it.
Jenny may be a murderous water spirit with a taste for human flesh, but it turns out that falling in love presents an altogether more complicated problem: how exactly do you maintain a healthy relationship with someone who remains, quite literally, on the menu?
To celebrate the book’s release today, September 29, CinemaChords sat down with Daniels to discuss creating Jenny, blending horror and romance in equal measures, the fun of putting a centuries-old river monster in contemporary Boston, and the particular challenge of writing a protagonist who can quite happily eat a person but has absolutely no idea what to do when she starts falling in love with one.