Femme Feral asks what happens when the prey finally grows teeth.
Sam Beckbessinger’s Femme Feral makes you check your own reflection for teeth. This new feminist body horror novel, set in Cape Town, follows a queer photographer’s transformation into something monstrous and glorious. Our Femme Feral review explores why this South African werewolf story is one of the most vital queer horror novels of the year, a book that fuses feminine rage, lycanthropic hunger, and a love story that refuses to flinch.
Femme Feral Review: Sam Beckbessinger’s Feminist Werewolf Novel
There is a sense of freedom that only arrives after the leash snaps. Not the freedom of careful negotiation, of measured steps within acceptable bounds, but the whole-body unravelling of every restraint you ever mistook for safety. Sam Beckbessinger’s Femme Feral understands this freedom intimately, and it wants you to feel it in your own bones. It is a werewolf novel, yes, but calling it that feels like calling the ocean wet. The book prowls through the familiar territory of lunar transformation, using it to ask a much more dangerous question: what if becoming the monster is not the tragedy but the point?
From the moment Charlie, a young queer photographer, wakes in Cape Town’s Company’s Garden with no memory of the previous night, her skin caked with dried blood that is not her own, the novel presses its thumb against your pulse and refuses to lift it. The atmosphere is humid with dread and something else, something closer to anticipation. Beckbessinger builds tension not through cheap jump scares but through the slow, inexorable tightening of a world that has decided Charlie’s body is a problem to be solved.
The prose itself feels feverish, slick with sweat and moonlight. I would describe Beckbessinger’s sentences as a swarm of nerve endings, each one firing off sensory data that bypasses the rational brain entirely and speaks straight to the animal crouched at the base of your skull.
The novel is structured around the phases of the moon, and this cyclical architecture does more than just mark time. It gives the narrative a tidal rhythm, pulling the reader out into deep, bloody waters and then withdrawing again into the quiet, domestic spaces where Charlie tries to hold her life together.
Her girlfriend, her housemates, her fledgling career, all of it begins to fray as the transformations accelerate. The lunar structure also mirrors something older, something menstrual and chthonic, and the book is unflinching in drawing that connection. This is body horror anchored not in disgust but in recognition. The body changes, it hungers, it makes demands that polite society refuses to hear. Beckbessinger writes these passages with a directness that left me winded.
Her use of the first-person present tense is a calculated and devastating choice. We are locked inside Charlie’s consciousness with no escape hatch, no retrospective narrator smoothing over the jagged edges. When her senses begin to sharpen beyond human limits, the prose sharpens with them. Smells become colours, sounds become textures.
Some horror novels make you check under the bed. Sam Beckbessinger’s Femme Feral makes you check your own reflection for teeth. This feminist body horror novel about a queer photographer’s lycanthropic liberation is a howl of feminine rage you won’t forget.
Beneath the surface, Femme Feral is a novel about rage, and specifically about the rage that women are taught to starve. Charlie’s lycanthropy is not a curse imposed from outside. It is an inheritance, something that has always lived in her and has finally been given permission to breathe. The book treats her transformation as a homecoming as much as a crisis. This is where the novel earns its weight. South Africa has one of the highest rates of gender-based violence on the planet, a reality that hums in the background of every scene without ever becoming didactic.
Sam Beckbessinger does not need to lecture. The context is there in the locked gates of Cape Town houses, in the casual threat assessments women conduct every time they walk to their cars, in the simple, terrifying fact that a woman who walks alone at night is already seen as prey. The book asks what happens when the prey grows teeth. It answers with love and blood and a howl that shakes the foundations.
Queer desire weaves through the narrative with the same intensity. Charlie’s relationship with her girlfriend is not a subplot or a token inclusion. It is the emotional engine of the story, the thing she is most afraid of breaking and the thing that ultimately must reckon with what she is becoming. The novel treats this love with tenderness and heat, and it refuses to sanitise either.
Before Femme Feral, Sam Beckbessinger was best known in horror circles for Girls of Little Hope, a collaboration with Dale Halvorsen that arrived in 2023 and felt like a VHS-era monster hunt wrapped in a queer coming-of-age story. That book was a love letter to friendship and 90s nostalgia, written with warmth and a sharp ear for teenage dialogue. Readers who fell for Girls of Little Hope will recognise in Femme Feral the same preoccupations with chosen family and the ways marginalised people find strength in one another.
The novel sits comfortably within the current resurgence of feminist body horror that has been reshaping the genre over the last decade, a wave that includes works like Rachel Harrison’s Such Sharp Teeth and, further back, the raw domestic werewolf fury of Glen Duncan’s The Last Werewolf. But Beckbessinger does something distinct with the template. Where Harrison’s novel leans into wry humour and romantic comedy structure, Femme Feral is less interested in reassuring the reader that everything will be okay.
It commits more fully to the monstrous, to the possibility that the transformation is not a problem to be solved but a state to be inhabited. It also shares territory with Stephen Graham Jones’s Mongrels, another novel that treats lycanthropy as an identity inherited through blood and culture, but Beckbessinger’s focus on the interiority of a queer woman in a postcolonial urban landscape gives it a texture entirely its own.
Femme Feral is not a novel that borrows folklore unchanged from elsewhere. It roots the werewolf myth in Cape Town’s specific soil, in the Company’s Garden where Charlie first wakes, in the mountain that casts its shadow over the city, in the complicated, layered histories that make a place what it is.
What makes Femme Feral feel so urgent in this moment is its refusal to apologise for its protagonist’s hunger. The horror genre has always been a safe container for exploring what polite culture cannot say aloud, and right now, the thing that seems most unsayable is that women might be done negotiating.
Beckbessinger has written a book that sharpens its claws and waits for you to catch up. The novel does not argue that the monster within is secretly good. It argues that the monster within is real, and that your approval is irrelevant. That is a terrifying proposition, and it is also a deeply exhilarating one.
A woman learns she is capable of ripping the world apart, and instead of recoiling in horror, she exhales. That is the sound this book makes.
Femme Feral by Sam Beckbessinger
Publisher : Bloomsbury Archer
AN OBSERVER BEST NEW NOVELIST 2026
A GOODREADS MOST ANTICIPATED NOVEL 2026
‘Savage, witty, gory, heartfelt, utterly relatable rage fantasy and a helluva good time’ Lauren Beukes, The Shining Girls
‘A modern feminist classic’ Sunday Times Style
‘A cathartic, necessary read’ Catriona Silvey, Meet Me in Another Life
‘Rollicking, unexpected and utterly hilarious’ Observer
‘Witty, thrilling, and oh so righteously FERAL’ Nat Cassidy, When the Wolf Comes Home
‘I laughed, cried and felt vindicated. Superb’ Shubnum Khan, The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years
EVER FELT READY TO HOWL?
Hyper-competent start up CFO Ellie is 46-year-old and like most women, is already juggling too much. Daughter’s not talking to her, husband’s not listening to her, and she’s got a promotion coming up at work. It’s an inconvenient time to be beset by mid-life symptoms: coarse hair in new places, hot flushes, insomnia, losing time . . . finding bloodstains on all her clothing, howling at the moon.
Her doctor diagnoses perimenopause. But it’s another 28-day cycle that’s taking hold. One involving fur, and teeth, and a not insignificant amount of rage.
Suddenly the troubles in her life – hot flushes, thankless family, spiralling to-do list, oblivious husband, the w*nker promoted above her at work – seem almost . . . bite-size.
A deeply gratifying, highly addictive and provocative read, Femme Feral is an exhilarating expression of feminine rage, with a warning: If you swallow your anger, it’s sure to come back with a bite.
