Femme Feral is a sly werewolf horror about the menopause

Portrait by Suki Dhanda for The Observer

Feminism and horror have history. Consider the gothic intricacies of Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, the claustrophobia of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story The Yellow Wallpaper, the menace of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. It’s a genre that feasts not only on gender injustice but also the form-altering experiences of female adolescence and pregnancy. Less well tapped is the real-life body horror potential of the menopause. Enter Femme Feral, the first adult novel by Sam Beckbessinger, which combines on-the-nose satire with werewolf horror, reframing “the change” in ways both entertaining and provocative. It has already earned Beckbessinger, a South African writer living in London, a place on the Observer debut novelists of 2026 list.

The book begins conventionally enough as Eleanor Fourie comes to, on a London road, having tangoed with a Brompton bike. Shaking off help, she’s intent only on locating the phone she’d been texting on and getting to her meeting. This she does, despite the gash on her forehead needing stitches. She even manages to buy pastries for the office en route.

Ellie is not an intern. She’s 44 years old and believes that her outgoing boss is about to anoint her CEO of their startup, a mental health app that conjures tailored meditations. Instead, she’s publicly humiliated as the position goes to Andreas, a younger interloper with an outsize ego and zero experience. That’s when she loses consciousness for a second time.

Nothing captures overachiever Ellie quite so well as her infinite to-do list. In quoting from it, Beckbessinger snappily conveys the harried reality of the “sandwich generation”: along with the demands of work, Ellie is caught between caring for her student daughter, Paige, who’s in recovery from anorexia, and her father-in-law, Yusuf, who’s suffering from heart trouble, diabetes and dementia. In A&E, she’s given another item to add to the list: “figure out menopause”.

The reader is soon catapulted into episodes of nocturnal mayhem powered by all the repressed fury that the average middle-aged woman could channel if she only dug deep enough. Beckbessinger isn’t coy about any of this – there’s no intimation that Ellie might be having a psychological episode. There is, however, a pleasing slyness in the overlap between plausible time-of-life symptoms and Ellie’s latent lycanthropy. Behaviour changes, blinding rage, memory loss – they all count as normal. Ditto increased body hair (fur?) and thickening nails (claws?). But what about a ravenous appetite for revenge? Or the experience of waking up in a distant part of the city with what might just be entrails tangled in your hair?

The novel belongs to Ellie, but an entwined subplot tracks Brenda, an elderly curmudgeon with fast-failing eyesight. When the butchered bodies of cats start turning up in her neighbourhood, Brenda turns vigilante. An additional narrative strand involving Paige and campus sexual harassment could easily have felt like overkill but Beckbessinger orchestrates a fast-paced denouement with ease, gesturing to a future that neatly ties up the novel’s fantasy and realist elements.

Meanwhile, the quips take aim at everything from tech’s woman problem to the taboo of female anger. Beckbessinger is an astute analyser of character, too. Ellie’s workplace usurper may be the smug villain you’d imagine but Mo, her oblivious husband of 25 years, isn’t quite the handsome softie he first appears to be.

As Ellie’s symptoms grow more extreme, her motivations remain sharply relatable. Yes, Femme Feral is liberatingly daft but it does something more than just deliver howling laughter. Beneath the cathartic comedy are striking ideas: the realisation that affirmations are a new opiate of the masses, for instance, or the sheer impossibility of keeping desire alive in a marriage. Most daringly of all, it nudges the reader towards a radical rethink of the menopause: in rushing to treat its most debilitating symptoms, what else might we be medicating away?

Femme Feral by Sam Beckbessinger is published by Bloomsbury Archer (£18.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £15.99. Delivery charges may apply