An Interview With Author E. Saxey

E. Saxey is an ungendered Londoner who works in universities. Their fiction has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Apex Magazine, Queers Destroy Science Fiction and in anthologies including Tales from the Vatican Vaults and The Lowest Heaven. They live in London and tweet at @esaxey. Firstly, Unquiet is a stunning book. Thank you for sharing it with the world. It already means a great deal to me personally. What do you want people to take away from it?   Ideally I’d like people to find it enchanting and excruciating, a bit of a balance. There are some eerie and agonizing parts, and it would be great haunt readers and generally put them through the ringer, but there’s also art and love and hope. Having published short stories before, how was the experience of writing and publishing your debut novel?   The editorial attention was brilliant. I know some people chafe at it but I swept through my edits agreeing to nearly everything and thanking my lucky stars that other people were repairing my mistakes. Including classic polite notes on continuity: “The clock has already struck eight in this scene; would you like it to strike nine?”   How has this experience influenced your writing practice, or outlook?   It’s made me fearfully conscious of readers. I’m turning to my work in progress and asking: “Do people want to spend six-plus hours with this narrator? What’s this page for?”. Questions which might put a crimp in the creative spirit, but which are useful for editing.   Victorian London Gothic is a wonderfully rich and enduring favorite genre, even beyond those who typically read genre fiction. What in particular speaks to you about this genre, time and setting?   It’s a time of enormous change and tension. There’s a desire to pin...
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