With her third novel, Femlandia now out in paperback, US author Christina Dalcher reveals it’s her favourite – a surprise admission given that her debut, Vox, took the book world by storm.
Published in 2018, the novel that is often compared to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Vox went on to sell 200,000 copies and win the 2019 Goldsboro Glass Bell Award. Set in a dystopian world where women’s daily speech is restricted to 100 words, it is a “cautionary tale” about gender politics, backlash and cultural shift”.
The 54-year-old, who has a doctorate in theoretical linguistics and only started writing novels in 2014, then penned Q – a chilling story about the enforced removal of children who full below the intelligence quotient (Q) and are sent to a federal boarding school – which published the height of the pandemic in 2020.
Femlandia is billed as another dystopian chiller. Set in an alternate near future where society is in chaos, it follows a woman and her daughter who seek sanctuary in a women-only colony, only to find their safe haven has a sinister undertow and is even more dangerous than the world outside.
Speaking from her home in New Norfolk, Virginia, Dalcher tells P.S: “In terms of the writing and the theme, Femlandia is my favourite of my three novels. It really pushed some buttons because no one knew what to think of me or how to think of me.
“They were trying to reconcile the woman who wrote Vox – which sort of had a feminist manifesto – with the woman who wrote Femlandia. And they were trying to figure out how on earth could the same person write a story where women are so awfully evil and where misandry rules.
“I guess the answer to that is I am not just one person. Wouldn’t it be boring if I wrote the same thing or worked on the same theme? I am happy with Femlandia.”
Of its inspiration, she explains: “I’d read Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman about a woman-only utopia, interestingly enough written by a woman but narrated by men, and I thought, ‘Wow, utopia. There are women living in peace and harmony and magically able to procreate.’ And I thought, ‘what if they weren’t magically able to procreate and what if they had to keep up the species in some other way.’
“I wanted to write a horror story and turn that idea of a woman-only community on its head. We always say anything a man can do, a woman can do equally as well. Why should that only apply to good things. Why couldn’t it apply to evil? I wanted to have a little fun with it and tweaked a few nerves in the process. But that’s the fun of writing. We don’t write to please people we write to get things out, to present an idea in a different way.”
Dalcher, who lives with her husband and when not writing, likes to spend her time cooking, gardening, dog sitting and scuba diving, has already written her fourth novel, and it’s a departure from dystopia.
She reveals: “It’s a thriller about the death penalty and is coming out next summer, which I am very excited about. It asks a huge question: what if you send someone to his death and then it turns out you got it wrong? And I am working on a really cool thriller right now about scuba diving. It has a cli-fi (climate fiction) aspect to it. It’s great fun”.
Christina Dalcher – Femlandia, HQ, £8.99
Enjoy the convenience of having The Sunday Post delivered as a digital ePaper straight to your smartphone, tablet or computer.
Subscribe for only £5.49 a month and enjoy all the benefits of the printed paper as a digital replica.
Subscribe