Fen: Summary & Key Insights

The fenlands are not merely a backdrop to these stories; they are the source from which every transformation flows. To me, the fens are alive — ancient, unstable terrain reclaimed from the sea yet always yearning to return to it. The land shapes the people who live on it: their speech, their labour, their dreams. The houses sink millimetre by millimetre each year, the air is thick with damp, and even daylight seems to hover uncertainly. In that half-light, time bends, and the surreal feels native.

When I wrote these stories, I thought often of the fen as a membrane rather than a place. It separates and connects the human and the more-than-human. Here the supernatural becomes ordinary. In such a landscape, girls can turn into foxes, desires into hauntings, and grief into the calling of an unseen tide. Nature is not comforting but intimate — sometimes cruel, sometimes redemptive. The people who belong to the fenlands live with that constant awareness: to survive here is to understand that you might someday be changed by the land.

The act of transformation lies at the heart of *Fen*, and nowhere is it more visceral than in the story of a woman who turns into an eel. Her change is not punishment nor miracle; it is the physical language of longing taken to its final conclusion. She loves a man who cannot stay, and so she slips from human skin into something more enduring, more fluid. The eel becomes an emblem of surrender and survival: she escapes the limits imposed by the body, by gender, by social expectation, and yet she pays the price of solitude.

When I wrote her story, I wanted to explore how female desire often finds itself rendered monstrous — how, from myth to fairy tale, women who want too much are transformed, silenced, or cast out. But in the fen, transformation is not exile; it is evolution. By becoming eel, she claims her own shape, one aligned with the secret currents of the landscape. Her metamorphosis is both loss and liberation, and it establishes the collection’s central truth — that desire, when fully embraced, inevitably changes us.