Rehearsing Fear and Danger
In primary school, we played a game called ‘Jack the Ripper’ with high excitement. All we needed was a very cold night with deep fog. Some of our streets only had lights on the corners. In the long intervals of pitch black, you could roam invisibly, or pretend you were just a little nervous, on your way home, until … Cue screaming, chasing, hiding, weeping, leaping out from behind things with a sinister laugh. ‘Got you now, girlie,’ we’d say.
Why nine and ten-year-olds were allowed out to play in the freezing darkness, I do not know, but I remember being at my best friend’s back door saying, by way of invitation, ‘It’s really really foggy!’ as my breath puffed white in the cold. ‘You can’t see a thing.’
The children in my story The Wailey Willow make a game of being scared. At the height of the story, the narrator is in ‘an ecstasy of fear.’ I know those aren’t the words of an adolescent but gee I nailed the feeling.
The My Favorite Murder podcast has been running since 2016. Hosts Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark started the podcast because they desperately wanted to talk about murderers and their female victims and have gathered a huge following of fans who call themselves ‘Murderinos’. They say that talking about murder with other women relieves their anxiety about being murdered. They want to know how it happens so they can prevent it happening to them. The humour is really helpful because we all know there is no way to prevent it happening unless you never leave the house, and that might not be enough, and in fact might be the cause of it. Their motto is 'Stay Sexy, Don't Get Murdered'.
Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls is in this vein. Warnings to girls and women and ceaseless examples of how they can end up raped and/or murdered become an echo chamber. Being naive is a risk but learning all you can about it doesn’t help. Being terrified doesn’t help. If you want to live, you must go into the world and take your chances. The excitable girls in my stories are intoxicated with life’s possibilities, afraid with good reason, afraid for no reason, reckless and determined, or just plain desperate. How do you live in spite of it all? That is the question that each of them seeks to answer.
Longlisted for the 2023 Indie Book Awards.
Excitable girls rush out to meet life; what could go wrong? A masterful debut about the terrifying thrills of innocence from a voice of experience.
Teenagers sneak out to the creek for a wild New Year's Eve party. A sleep-deprived woman who imagines she is pregnant to a Viking faces her scathing sixteen-year-old self. A woman in love wakes up in a van Gogh painting.
These gem-like stories are about the desire to rush out and meet life; about getting in over your head; about danger, and damage, and what it means to survive – and not always survive – the risk of being young. They chart the borderlands between girls and women, daughters and mothers, freedom and fear.
Emerging fully-formed and singing songs of both innocence and experience, Anne Casey-Hardy is the rarest of new voices: at the same time reckless and entirely in control; funny and frightening; wise and full-blooded.
Praise for Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls
‘I find myself haunted by this innocent, menacing, blackly funny and fabulous book. Anne Casey-Hardy’s writing hums with a dangerous, coiled energy in sly, ghostly stories of girls and women striking back, lying low, busting out, triumphing even while sinking. Casey-Hardy is a raw, rare talent with an unforgettable voice.’ Charlotte Wood, author of The Weekend and The Natural Way of Things
'Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls buzzes with energy. Anne Casey-Hardy is a wonderful fiction writer. Her characters are brave and full of soul. In mapping the lives and the places where stories thrive, Casey-Hardy also touches our hearts. Such a gift.' Tony Birch, author of Dark as Last Night and The White Girl
‘Electric, irreverent, haunting, heart-breaking – one of the best short story collections you'll ever read. An exceptional debut from a hugely talented writer.’ Wayne Marshall, author of Shirl
‘You’ll be transfixed by the misadventures of Casey-Hardy's dangerously innocent heroines. Her fractured fairy tales are like nothing you’ve come across before: unnerving, brilliant, hilarious, heart-stirring.’ Lucinda Holdforth, author of Leading Lines