Discovering the Magic of Priya Sharma’s Fiction

In conversation with Priya Sharma

My first introduction to Priya Sharma was the incredible story “Fabulous Beasts,” which was originally published in 2015 as a Tor.com original. This horror novelette was a Shirley Jackson Award finalist and winner of the British Fantasy Award for Short Fiction. It is also the title story for Sharma’s debut collection All the Fabulous Beasts (2018), which won the Shirley Jackson Award and the British Fantasy Award for Best Collection. It is still one of my favorite collections of all time. Sharma’s short fiction truly shines, and her work can be found in some of the best anthologies published each year. A few of my favorites include “The Crow Palace,” included in Black Feathers (2017); “Feral,” which first appeared in The Porcupine Boy & Other Anthological Oddities (2019), and “The Ghost of a Flea,” published in Screams from the Dark: 29 Tales of Monsters and the Monstrous (2022). Although she is a master of short fiction, Sharma has shown herself adept in longer forms as well. Her debut novella Ormeshadow (2019) won the Shirley Jackson Award as well as the British Fantasy Award. And she followed this up with her extraordinary dystopian tale of Hades and Persephone in Pomegranates (2022), which won the World Fantasy award last year. 

One of the things I love the most about Priya’s work is way she weaves fairy tales, folklore, and myth into stories so sleek and shining that they fly even though they should be weighed down by the heavy topics she tackles. “Fabulous Beasts,” for instance, takes an unflinching look at incest; “Egg” contemplates infertility; and “Jack O’Dander” (Reactor, October 2023), one of her most recent stories, examines the dark shadows left behind when children go missing. Today, I am still an avid fan. As a writer myself, I love to study her use of language and imagery. As a reader, I eagerly devour each new story, each new world, greedy and always hungry for more. Luckily, Priya Sharma has quite a line-up of tales she’s currently working on, and I’m looking forward to each and every one. –Carina Bissett

Link to “Jack O’Dander”: https://reactormag.com/jack-odander-priya-sharma/

About Priya Sharma

Priya Sharma’s fiction has appeared in venues such as Interzone, Black Static, Nightmare, The Dark and Reactor. Her work has been translated into Spanish, French, Italian, Czech and Polish.

“Fabulous Beasts” was a Shirley Jackson Award finalist and won a British Fantasy Award for Short Fiction. All the Fabulous Beasts (Undertow Publications), won a Shirley Jackson Award and British Fantasy Award for best collection, and was a Locus Award finalist. Ormeshadow (Reactor), her first novella and won a Shirley Jackson Award and a British Fantasy Award. It was also a 2022 Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire finalist. Her second novella, Pomegranates (Absinthe Books) was a World Fantasy Award winner and a British Fantasy Award and Shirley Jackson Award finalist. Priya is a medical doctor who lives in the UK. 

Website: priyasharmafiction.wordpress.com

Interview with Priya Sharma

BISSETT: What attracts you to horror as a genre?

SHARMA: I maintain that it is a much safer medium via which to process things that I find difficult and frightening. I struggle to watch films about real-life events. They’re too close to home. Too real. Please abstract it for me. Cloak it in metaphor. As to writing, I’ve tried straight fiction but it’s a struggle to keep something dark from creeping in. I think that comes from a mix of nature and nurture. 

BISSETT: Who or what terrifies you?

SHARMA: Sexual violence and sexual abuse. It’s a power crime of the most invasive type.

Growing up in the 1970s it was often presented in film and on TV in a salacious way, or that’s how I remember it. It was a culture where you were culpable somehow if it happened to you. Bad things happened to women who were bad. I’m thinking of the police and press response to the Yorkshire Ripper murders. The first few women to die were “prostitutes”, not wives, not mothers, not daughters. Sexual abuse and rape of men and boys wasn’t discussed.

I remember a sleep-over at school in my teens. We were a big group of girls and one of them put on Deliverance. The infamous Ned Beatty scene turned my stomach. Not just for the violence of it, but the sheer humiliation his character was subjected to. I walked out. Later, when I was about 17, I saw the hugely important and shattering film The Accused at the cinema, and I’ve never been able to watch it again.

Even during my own personal #metoo moments I asked myself—Did I bring this on myself? What could I have done differently?—which is ridiculous. 

BISSETT: What advice do you have to women working in the field?

SHARMA: There are people out there who are quite happy to tell you what you should be doing. I abhor the word ‘should’. Write what you want to write. You’ll never please everyone and you can’t represent everyone else’s experiences. Women aren’t a big, homogenised mass. Nor is it your job to educate the world. Write want matters to you and what moves you. If it touches someone else or helps them understand a different point of view, that’s great, but write for yourself.  

Study your craft. Keep writing, keep submitting, keep knocking on doors.  I’m hoping for a time when WIHM and panels about diversity aren’t necessary anymore. Write your enemies into obsolescence. 

BISSETT: What authors or works would you recommend to readers?

SHARMA: There are SO many great books and short stories out there by women. I always worry about making lists as I’m afraid of leaving people out. I’m going to do something different instead.

In support of smaller presses, I would recommend that you check out the back catalogue of Undertow Publications (lots of great short story collections), PS Publishing’s Absinthe range (which are novellas), and Black Shuck Books’ Shadows range (micro-collections). They all contain a mix of different styles and types of horror, and women are well represented.

In the last few years there are a couple of books that have stayed with me: The Daylight Gate by Jeanette Winterson (about the Pendle witch trials), Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enriquez (gothic horror in Argentina), and I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacquline Harpman (not horror, but something quiet and mesmerising).

BISSETT: What are you currently working on? 

SHARMA: I have three short stories in the pipeline for this year, which I can’t talk about too much. Two are themed, which I enjoy once I’ve figured out what I want to do with the subject.

The first one has involved several trips to local undertakers, which has been fascinating. I’m no stranger to funeral homes as a doctor, but I wanted to listen to the experiences of people who work there—especially where it’s been a business that’s been in the family for generations. I also went to an interesting lecture a few months ago on Death and the Victorians. It was a time of high infant mortality rates, and where people died at home. Disease, accidents in newly mechanised factories, were all rife. The promise of Heaven was a salve for the suffering of daily life.  It’s made me think again about our attitude to death and process of saying goodbye to someone that we love.

BISSETT: Your work often connects to fairy tales, folklore, and myth. What draws you to this source material, and how do you change it to make it your own?

SHARMA: When I think about my childhood several things come to my mind:

• My parents telling me about Hindu myths. How Ganesha became elephant headed and the exploits of Hanuman.
• The tiny library in my primary school. I remember sitting there at breaktime, reading children’s version of the Greek myth.
• My brother’s comic books—both Marvel and DC. Superheroes, who are just modern versions of Gods after all, complete with foibles and frailty.
• Fairy tales, from Disney to all the books I had as a child.
• Ray Harryhausen: Jason and the Argonauts, Sinbad the Sailor, and Clash of the Titans.

All these things were embedded in mind from a young age, but then I discovered Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber” and Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling’s series of books, such as Snow White, Blood Red and Black Thorn, White Rose, that reworked or modernised fairy tales into something closer to their origins. Something dark and adult.

I also realised there was a group of academics out there interested in fairy tales and discovered work by Jack Zipes and Mariana Warner. Warner’s book From the Beast to the Blonde was gifted to me by a friend at university and I still have it. The tropes and psychology of it all feels very exciting to me. I think that they’re always ripe for reworking to reflect current thinking. Myths are creation tales; fairy tales and folklore plug into our relationship with each other and nature. What’s not to like?

About Pomegranates by Priya Sharma (PS Publishing, 2022)

Pomegranates is a dystopian tale, where climate change is an all-too-real backdrop to the events of the novella. Persephone is in the Underworld, relating her family’s history to a human who’s found his way there. As events unfold, and we see the horror her anger has unleashed on the world, we’re drawn deeper and deeper into the heart of this amazing story. The author has drawn a vivid picture of the world’s decay set against the backdrop of the repercussions of a dysfunctional family. And what a family it is―the gods themselves, bringing destruction on us all.

Carina Bissett

Carina Bissett is a writer and poet working primarily in the fields of dark fiction and fabulism. She is the author of numerous shorts stories, which are featured in her debut collection Dead Girl, Driving and Other Devastations (Trepidatio Publishing, 2024), and she is the co-editor of the award-winning anthology Shadow Atlas: Dark Landscapes of the Americas. She is currently a Bram Stoker finalist for her essay “Words Wielded by Women” (Apex Magazine, 2023), a comprehensive retrospective of women in horror. Links to her work can be found at http://carinabissett.com.

Dead Girl, Driving and Other Devastations

In this powerful debut, Carina Bissett explores the liminal spaces between the magical and the mundane, horror and humor, fairy tales and fabulism. A young woman discovers apotheosis at the intersection of her cross-cultural heritage. A simulacrum rebels against her coding to create a new universe of her own making. A poison assassin tears the world apart in the relentless pursuit of her true love—the one person alive who can destroy her. Dead Girl, Driving and Other Devastations erases expectations, forging new trails on the map of contemporary fiction. Includes an introduction by Julie C. Day, author of Uncommon Miracles and The Rampant. 

Praise for Dead Girl, Driving and Other Devastations

“Carina Bissett is one of my favorite speculative authors writing today—magic and myth, horror and revenge, wonder and hope. Her stories are original, lyrical, and haunting—Shirley Jackson mixed with Ursula LeGuin and a dash of Neil Gaiman. An amazing collection of stories.—Richard Thomas, author of Spontaneous Human Combustion, a Bram Stoker Award finalist

“Carina Bissett’s collection is a thing of wonder and beauty. It is a true representation of Carina herself: whimsical, visceral, lovely, and fierce. You can hear women’s voices screaming while roses fall from their lips. Dead Girl, Driving and Other Devastations is a triumph.”—Mercedes M. Yardley, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Little Dead Red

“From fairy tale revisions to fresh takes on monstrous transitions and the absolute horrors of being female, no one knows how to write a story like Carina Bissett. Fierce yet fragile.”—Lindy Ryan, author of Bless Your Heart

“In a debut collection weaving folklore and fairy tale and told in magical, lyrical, irresistible prose, Carina Bissett inveigles readers with the breadth of her skill. A feat of woven wonder, with spells sketched in the air and strands stretched taut, Dead Girl Driving and Other Devastations is an enchanting tapestry of silken stories, the collection establishing Bissett as a world-class author of fabulism, fantasy, and horror. A must-read for lovers of Neil Gaiman, Angela Slatter, and Carmen Maria Machado.” —Lee Murray, five-time Bram Stoker Awards-winning author of Grotesque: Monster Stories

“Ravishing flights of fantasy.”—Priya Sharma, Shirley Jackson award-winning author of All the Fabulous Beasts and Ormeshadow

“Dark, often violent, Dead Girl, Driving & Other Devastations doesn’t lie to you about the nature of its stories. Between the title page and the Afterword lies a harrowing alliance of nightmare and fairytale. The pages are full of strange birds, resurrections, second chances, monstrous women, enchantments, and inventions. These stories explore a dark and permissive imagination, unafraid to disturb the monster at the back of the cave. It is a collection for the brave and forlorn, for those seeking escape, vengeance, transformation, or grace. There is wonder here, and freedom from shackles—for those fierce enough to wrench loose of them.”—C. S. E. Cooney, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Saint Death’s Daughter

“Carina’s short stories are absolutely luminous and deeply unsettling. Savour this collection like a fine blood-red wine. It’s absolute perfection and will linger long after the pages are closed.”—KT Wagner

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