Awooooooo… The Waves and Rough Trade Books announce a bonfire-edging event to celebrate Drool, the new novel by Charlie Fox.

In Drool, Zoe Thrasher is a teenage misfit with a sick grandfather, and she is desperately in need of escape. Pyromania and fireworks are her only loves until the moonlit night she meets Wolfie, a zonked and dreamy hooligan dealing with Lupine Mutation Syndrome. As the pair throw themselves into a hedonistic courtship, they take us on a wild adventure through a warped version of contemporary London — full of strange bodies, bad dreams, and ghosts. Pretty soon the young lovers are in all kinds of trouble… and trouble fits them like a new fur coat. The flames are getting higher and higher, and sirens are coming in the wake of the wolf howls.

Drool is a girl-meets-wolf love story, a body horror fable about trauma and transformation, lusciously romantic, wickedly funny, told in swaggering neon prose. This is ‘Red Riding Hood’ retold as Romeo and Juliet, a hymn to the joys and terrors of being bad from one of the slyest narrators of recent fiction. If Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red was rewritten in lighter fluid and Slush Puppie or Fernanda Melchor wrote about Bonfire Night — that’s Drool. Take its crafty paw and get lost. Haven’t you ever wanted to explode?

‘Mr. Fox is the real thing.’ –John Waters

We here at The Waves are over the moon to host this happening. Charlie will be reading from the book and conversing with another fierce literary voice, Jen Calleja.

It’s another free event — but space is limited, so we suggest you register here to secure your spot.

Charlie Fox is a writer and artist who lives in London. His work has appeared in Dazed, The New York Times and The Paris Review. He has curated exhibitions for Sadie Coles and Lodovico Corsini. His book of essays This Young Monster was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2017. Drool is his first novel.

Jen Calleja is a writer and literary translator based in Hastings. Her books include the experimental memoirs Goblinhood: Goblin as a Mode and Fair: The Life-Art of Translation and the novel Vehicle.

Description supplied by the event organiser.