The Cat Bride

Charlotte Tierney

PUBLICATION DATE: 7 APRIL 2025 | SALT PUBLISHING | £10.99 | PAPERBACK ORIGINAL

Much more than simply the wry horror of a young woman’s beastly metamorphosis, The Cat Bride is a beautifully written and creepy exploration of the eerie liminality of adolescence, viewed through a pastoral gothic fug of the lairy nineties, and a thrilling take of the legend of the Beast of Dartmoor.

The heatwave of 1995. Sixteen years since an infamous tiger-lynx hybrid escaped a small moorland zoo and killed a man. Sixteen years since the animal was euthanised. Sixteen years for the zoo to fall into disrepair. Lowdy’s Mumma grew up in the zoo, and when Lowdy falls ill, they’re forced to move to the old zoo for her to recover, and to care for her dying grandmother. But as soon as they arrive, rumours surface of a big cat stalking the moors again. Vengeful locals blame the three women for an apex predator on the loose, and invade the estate, searching for clues.

Mumma insists all the cats are dead. Grandma whispers that the ‘tynx’ needs to be fed. Lowdy, still recovering from her own mysterious illness, has no idea what to believe. Can she even trust herself when she wakes up covered in ticks with no recollection of the night before?

As Lowdy searches for the truth – the truth of her childhood, what it means to be a woman, and the truth about the cats – she realizes that something catlike that runs in the blood, something she cannot ignore.

Charlotte Tierney’s work has been published in Best British Short Stories 2024, Conjunctions, The London Magazine and New England Review among others. She is inspired by contemporary genre-bending writers but also the taut social atmospheres of restraint and oppression found in classic weird women’s fiction. She lives in Dartmoor and is available for interview and to write features.