Lucy Foley studied English literature at Durham University and University College London and worked for several years as a fiction editor in the publishing industry. She is the author of five novels including The Paris Apartment and The Guest List. She lives in London.
Foley's newest novel is The Midnight Feast.
At CrimeReads the author tagged six favorite stories of folk horror, including:
Sharp Objects by Gillian FlynnRead about the other entries on the list.
For me there’s a True Detective-esque feel to the atmosphere of this small-town-America set thriller. There’s much made of alocal “Woman in White” folktale: supposedly this witchlike figure is responsible for the deaths of a couple of Wind Gap’s children. As Gillian Flynn said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, this was inspired by “the original Slender Man sort of idea, how that came to be”. There’s a horrifying hunting shack in the woods, the source of much of the protagonist Camille’s past trauma (this trauma being far worse than anything supernaturally-inflicted) and a very folk horror sense of tradition and the fear of breaking tradition, alongside a creeping dread and unease throughout in which nothing and no-one is really what they seem.
Sharp Objects is among Katherine Higgs-Coulthard's top six crime-in-the-family thrillers, Zach Vasquez's seven dark novels about motherhood, Christina Dalcher's seven crime books that challenge the idea of inherent female goodness, Nicole Trope's six domestic suspense novels where nothing is really ever what it seems, Heather Gudenkauf's ten great thrillers centered on psychology, and Peter Swanson's ten top thrillers that explore mental health.
--Marshal Zeringue
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