I wait for Perry in a dark-walled cafe in London, and notice that just behind me, gibbet-like, hangs a leg of ham. The book is so strange that you become sensitised to the eerie and uncanny all around you. The book is stippled with unsettling thoughts – talking about fossils, one character says: “Sometimes I think we must be walking on shoals of bodies without realising it and all the earth’s a graveyard.” Set in 1893, this gothic tale follows the young widow Cora Seaborne, an enthusiastic amateur palaeontologist, to a dank wetlands village in Essex, where a sea serpent is said to be terrorising villagers. Its distinctive serpent-in-the-garden-of-William Morris cover is laden with praise from Sarah Waters and John Burnside. Perry’s book, The Essex Serpent, has been in the bestseller lists for weeks, has been championed by literary editors and, until the longlist was announced last week without her name on it, was mentioned as a Booker prize possibility. “I hunched over until I would get numb toes.” “It was like I was possessed, it came out really quickly,” she says. Nine months later, she had a first draft. It then took another 18 months before she did anything about it, but one February morning, she began. “Immediately, I thought if that beast came back in the Victorian era, post-Darwin, when there was a trend for natural history and people were fossil-collecting, people would have a very different response from those in the 17th century, who had seen this beast.” By the end of the 40-minute journey, Perry had plotted the entire story, knew her characters, “and the idea of setting up a conflict between myth and superstition and faith and reason and science and all of those clashing over this one potential beast”. Perry felt her scalp tighten, the better to grasp the idea and keep it safe inside her head – a feeling she has become used to when she thinks of something she knows will make a great book. I t was Sarah Perry’s husband who told her, on a car journey through Essex, having spotted a sign to the village of Henham, about the legend of a serpent.
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