It was a fun project, one I was trying not to take too seriously I wrote pretty sentences and included some of my favorite tropes (“only one bed,” anyone?) and I was having fun. (I was a huge Charmed fangirl back in the day and my obsession with witches has never faded.) As I played with the idea it really grew into something else and I threw myself into writing it without really thinking.

I knew it would have to be queer, probably Sapphic, and I also knew that any retelling I would write would have to contain magic. Of course, as is always the way when you’re supposed to be writing something else, this immediately set the gears going in my brain, prompting me to question what my Gatsby would look like. Somebody asked the question “Which book do you wish you’d written?” and I immediately posted The Great Gatsby, which I first read as a teenager and which was probably the sole reason I decided to study American literature at university and spend a year studying abroad in the States. Where did you get the idea for Wild And Wicked Things, and how, if at all, did that idea evolve as you wrote it?įunnily enough, the idea actually came to me while I was noodling around on Twitter one day. When Annie witnesses a chance confrontation between Emmeline and her childhood best friend Bea (who fled to the island a year before), Annie finds herself dragged into a mission to save them both from the deadly, illicit magic which has been cast, while she also attempts to understand her growing feelings for Emmeline. Crow Island has a reputation, though, for its lax attitude towards the prohibition on magic, and Annie soon finds herself neighbors with a rich, enigmatic woman who is a rumored witch.

It’s set in 1922, and about a young woman, Annie, who is summoned to an idyllic island off the coast of England when her estranged father dies and she’s asked to sort through and sell his estate. Wild And Wicked Things is basically what happens when you cross The Great Gatsbywith Practical Magic. To start, what is Wild And Wicked Things about, and when and where does it take place? Is urban fantasy still urban fantasy if it’s set somewhere rural? It’s a question that came up during the following email interview with writer Francesca May about her Gothic fantasy novel Wild And Wicked Things ( hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), in which we also discussed what inspired and influenced this tale.

The Lighthouse by Fran Dorricott