Crow Face, Doll Face by Carly Holmes
Carly Holmes’ sensational second novel, Crow Face, Doll Face, is a dark, mesmerising tale about motherhood, family, and the self, beautifully shaped around internal and external worlds which are simultaneously sinister, chaotic, loving, and loveless.
At the heart of the novel are Annie and her two children after whom the novel is named – Crow Face (Leila) and Doll Face (Kitty). From the opening lines of chapter one, we’re hit hard by a sense of change and loss, of unorthodoxy and difference. ‘I used to have three daughters and a son,’ Annie tells us. ‘We used to be average, as families went.’
It is through Annie’s first-person narrative that the story unfolds. ‘I knew that shackled life wasn’t going to be for me,’ she says, determined not to live the life of her parents, or her community. She settles, however, for domesticity, with unprecedented consequences.
There is so much to love about this utterly gripping novel permeated with strangeness and disquiet. The world here is one which captivates and unsettles; this is a story that will simultaneously hold your heart and shatter it. Breathtaking.
Q&A with author Carly Holmes
EC: As you know, I absolutely adored Crow Face, Doll Face. Gorgeously unsettling and moving, I'm still thinking about it and trying to resist the temptation to read it a fourth time! Did you have the title of the book from the outset or was it something that you reached through the writing of the story?
CH: Firstly, thank you so much for your support for my Crow Face, it is so appreciated! Though I’m often stumped for titles, particularly for short stories (some years ago I called a ghost story I was writing ‘Ghost Story’, that’s how bad I am at coming up with titles…) I had Crow Face, Doll Face nailed as the title for my novel before I even really knew what the novel was going to become. My cat is called Crow and I often call her Crow Face or Doll Face (or Crow Face Doll Face), so it just fell into place. I had the bare bones of an idea for the book and knew it would be about two peculiar little girls, and my Crow is a very peculiar little girl, so the title was an instant fit.
EC: What were your inspirations for writing such a complex (and in my view, necessary) depiction of motherhood?
CH: Motherhood ‒ particularly mothers who don’t have strong maternal instincts or who yearn for an alternative life where their identity isn’t wholly or dominantly filtered through the lens of being someone’s mother ‒ fascinates me. I’m not a mother myself, through choice, but I’m a woman, and I’m a daughter who has always had a complex and insecure relationship with my own mum. As a society we’re very judgmental towards ‘Bad Mothers’, and a woman doesn’t have to do much to be toppled from the pedestal of ‘Perfect Mother’. Both Crow Face and my first novel The Scrapbook are focussed on women for whom being a mother isn’t the all-consuming joy we’re all told it should be, and I tried hard in both books to explore their psyche without in any way condemning them. I guess a lot of that urge comes from a need to understand my own history.
EC: The novel is written from the perspective of Annie, mother of Crow Face and Doll Face. As narrator she is fascinating, opening up many moments in the novel to a myriad of interpretations. What was it like to write Annie and immerse yourself in her first-person narrative?
CH: The novel didn’t actually start out as Annie’s story. After my short story collection Figurehead was published by Tartarus Press I became more known as a horror writer, so when I decided to start a new novel (nine whole years after my first one!) I thought I was going to write a creepy story with two strange little girls as the centrepiece. It was supposed to be their story. But after a number of false starts I realised that it was the mother’s story I wanted to tell, so I shifted perspective and immediately found Annie’s voice. First-person narrative always works to get me behind the eyes of a character, to live beneath their skin. I’m incredibly protective of Annie and was worried that she’d be judged by readers for being far from perfect as a mother, but people have really understood and sympathised with her on the whole, which is wonderful. She’s a woman who sacrificed all that she could have been to become a wife and mother, and those unfulfilled dreams, that belief that she is destined for more than this, drive her actions through the story.
EC: You never tell us where the novel is set. Was it always your intention not to anchor it in a specific place?
CH: Yes, it was. I rarely locate my fiction in a specific or named place, preferring instead to use memory and imagination to evoke the spirit of the landscape. The Scrapbook was set on a fictionalised version of Jersey, where I was born and my family are from, but I resisted suggestions by my publisher to name it because it would then have become a book set on Jersey and that wasn’t the point. (Plus, I would have had to do lots of research to ensure total accuracy on a street level and I don’t ever plan or research my fiction beyond what’s strictly necessary.) Crow Face starts out on a council estate and those early descriptions of place are made up of memories of the estate I grew up on near Southampton; then it moves to a little rural cottage, which was partly conjured from my memories of the little tin-roofed cottage in Pontsian that we moved to when I was eleven. The kind of stories I write, stories which are driven by a character’s skewed and conflicted internal spaces, require an external landscape which mirrors that, in its refusal to be pinned down on a map.
EC: What fascinates you about the darker side of the human psyche?
CH: There’s something so much more interesting about unhappy families, isn’t there (thinking of Tolstoy’s famous (if a little simplistic) quote about happy families being all alike and unhappy families being unhappy in their own way). I think we’re all of us preoccupied to a greater or lesser degree with the darker side of the human psyche. Maybe there’s a frisson of There but for the grace of God… or a simple curiosity about what makes a person do what they do. I’m not interested in the ‘big impact’ narratives, I don’t read fiction or non-fiction books about serial killers or mass murderers or people being cruel and abusive to other people. That all leaves me miserable and depressed. But I am very interested in how fragile our civilised personas are, how quickly the mask can slip, and how precariously we tread through life. I’ve experienced awful depression at times, particularly through my teenage years, as well as OCD, anxiety, anorexia, and various phobias. I know how easily and how completely the darker side of life can overwhelm us.
EC: The novel has been described as both defying and crossing genres. Is genre something you think about when writing or is it a case of allowing the story to take you where it needs to go?
CH: I’ve never really given much thought to genre as regards my own writing; I just write the stories that speak to me the loudest. We ‒ humans ‒ like to pigeonhole everything, to know what box this or that fits into which will then make the thing knowable and understandable. That’s how it is for books. I do think the horror genre tag works against me with my novels as some people say to me, immediately and dismissively, often with a theatrical shudder, that they ‘don’t read horror’ so won’t want to read Crow Face (or anything else I’ve written), and some horror fans read my books and then are disappointed that they aren’t ‘proper’ horror. I love the thought that Crow Face slips between genres though! Maybe bookshops should have a ‘Between Genres’ shelf, save us local writers from the ‘Local Interest’ section! (That’s where I found a copy of Crow Face shelved when I went into a larger bookshop at Christmas, a mere two months after it was published. It didn’t look quite right there, next to the maps of Wales and books on rugby.)
EC: What are you working on next?
CH: I’m not, sadly! I was determined, after Crow Face was published last October and all of the editing and promo work was behind me, to make an immediate start on another novel in order to avoid the complete freeze I suffered after The Scrapbook came out. But my job is time-consuming and stressful, and creative in its own way (I work as a publishing manager and editor with Parthian), and much of my personal life is devoted to worshipping my four cats and worrying. Worrying takes up a LOT of my time. The irony is, if I had a writing project on the go then I’d be happier and more contented, less consumed with guilt and anxiety and self-loathing. Yet here I am, not writing. Aren’t humans weird?
Crow Face, Doll Face is published by Honno Press and is available to purchase online and via your local bookshop.