Fang Face

FANG FACE

A Gothic Novel

They called her a monster long before she understood what cruelty meant.

Born in the shadow of the English countryside, Eleanor Stoker enters the world bearing a deformity so extraordinary that those who encounter her can scarcely decide whether she is a miracle, a monstrosity, or something that ought never to have been born at all. Beneath the pale, unnatural teeth that emerge from her face, however, lives a fiercely intelligent and sensitive child, possessed of a remarkable gift for music and a longing for the ordinary tenderness that others receive without question.

But the world has little tenderness to spare for a girl like Eleanor.

Sold into a travelling exhibition of human curiosities, she discovers a society in which beauty is worshipped, suffering is entertainment, and the difference between fascination and cruelty is perilously thin. Among painted wagons, velvet curtains, gaslit theatres and the restless company of those whom respectable society has cast aside, Eleanor must learn what it means to be desired, despised, pitied and possessed, often by the very same people.

Yet there are things more terrible than the face reflected in a mirror, and wounds that no audience can see.

As Eleanor grows into womanhood, the music that once offered her refuge begins to acquire an unsettling power of its own, while the boundaries between longing and obsession, justice and vengeance, the living and the dead become increasingly uncertain. And somewhere beneath the spectacle of her extraordinary existence, a darker question waits to be answered:

When a world has spent a lifetime creating a monster, who bears the blame for what it becomes?

Lyrical, unsettling and profoundly human, Fang Face is a haunting work of Victorian Gothic horror about the violence of being seen, the terrible hunger to be loved, and the fragile distance between innocence and monstrosity.

For readers drawn to the dark beauty of Gothic fiction, the melancholy of the outsider and the exquisite horror of things that should have remained buried.

Some monsters are born. Others are made.