Oddbody author Rose Keating will always read vampire stories – debutiful

Rose Keating is an Irish writer who studied creative writing at the University of East Anglia, where she was a recipient of the Malcolm Bradbury Scholarship and the Curtis Brown Prize. She also won the Marian Keyes Young Writer Award, the Hot Press Write Here, Write Now Prize, and the Ted and Mary O’Regan Arts Bursary. In 2022, she received an Agility Award from the Irish Arts Council.

Her debut short story collection, Oddbody, features ten stories that feature women who defy societal norms in bizarrely satisfying and mind-bending ways.

We asked Keating to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that influenced her life and inspired her debut book.

What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?

Cirque du Freak, a vampire novel by Irish children’s author Darren Shan. This was the first book I ever physically bought and owned too, and one of the few books in general I had a brand-new copy of growing up. Usually, Mam would bring us to the library or second-hand shops to get books to read, but I had recently celebrated my first Holy Communion and had gone mad with the new found riches from that. My first stop after the big day was the 9-12 years old section of the Waterford Book Centre. I mostly bought the book because I was 8 and getting a book from the slightly older section made me feel like I was doing something illegal and thrilling. I read it in a day and then immediately began accosting my local library for every other book in the series, as well as terrorizing my little brother by reading him the gorier sections. 

What book helped you through puberty?

Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice, or more generally, her entire Vampire Chronicles series. I read IwtV for the first time about a year or two after reading the aforementioned Darren Shan novel; vampires were a reoccurring theme from childhood well into adolescence for me. I loved all of Anne Rice’s novels as a teenager and would reread them over and over once or twice a year until I was about sixteen. I never reread books anymore, but during that time period I found such comfort in retreating into the same familiar worlds, the same characters. Characters who, as vampires, were also so unchanging, frozen and beautiful in a way that calmed me and also caused great longing and envy during the tumultuous puberty years. 

What book do you think all teenagers should be assigned in school?

I loved poetry when I was a teenager, probably a lot more than I liked fiction at the time. I think poetry gets a bad reputation when taught in school. I enjoyed the poems we read in English lessons because I liked poetry in general, but I can see why giving Yeats or Keats to a room of bored 14-year-olds doesn’t always work. I think the skills of analyzing poetry is very necessary at this age though, forcing young readers to slow down and note small, slight details in a way that isn’t as urgent in prose – at least, not always to the same extent. By university, the poetry syllabus begins to feel a bit more fun, with sprinklings of Beat poetry and modernist and post-modernist verse, but I think maybe these are the things that should be introduced sooner. I had a copy of Howl, Kaddish and Other Poetry by Allen Ginsberg that I used to pour over when I fifteen and it made it so apparent that poetry could be shocking, raw, rebellious, which helped me understand that these things were true of literature as a whole. I didn’t understand a lot of it, but giving teenagers something that leaves an impression like that feels at least as important as studying onomatopoeia, continuous metaphors, pathetic fallacy. 

If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?

The writers that first made a strong and lasting impression on me as a writer rather than just as a reader were Raymond Carver, Lorrie Moore and Leonora Carrington. Unsurprisingly, all three of these I encountered for the first time during an undergraduate short story module, but I do think they all still hold up.  The first books I read of theirs respectively were ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,’ ‘Self-Help’ and Carrington’s ‘The Complete Stories’. I would include them in a Damn Good Writing class less because I think they are perfect, flawless books (although I do love them an awful lot), and more because I think they are such useful tools in exemplifying what strong writing looks like, how to achieve elegant, clever craft on the page, and for me personally being examples of specific lessons that shaped how I approach my work. Carver taught me about the effect of brevity, Moore about tragedy and humor, Carrington about the emotional logic (or non-logic) of non-realism. This is a slightly difficult question to answer because the things that are important and good to me will be different to a different kind of writer, but these three books are the base of how I think about strong craft. 

What books helped guide you while writing your book?

Sixty Stories by Donald Bartheleme, The Monstrous Feminine by Barbara Creed, Earthlings by Sayaka Murata, Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh, Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, The Doll’s Alphabet by Camilla Grudova, Virgin and Other Stories by April Ayers Lawson, Men Without Women by Ernest Hemmingway, No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July, Self Help by Lorrie Moore, The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver, Beloved by Toni Morrison, The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter, Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter, The Vegetarian by Hang Kang, Fen by Daisy Johnson, Boy Parts by Eliza Clarke, Show Them a Good Time by Nicole Flattery, Modern Times by Cathy Sweeney, Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker, Stag’s Leap by Sharon Olds, The Water Cure by Sophie McIntosh, I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman.

What books are on your nightstand now?

I’m in the middle of The Unworthy by Augustina Bazterrica at the minute and enjoying it a lot. Next on my pile is The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov which I had started but temporarily lost, and have now thankfully recovered from behind my fridge. After that, I’m planning on starting All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy because I haven’t read that one yet and found a copy recently, and then I’m sinking my teeth into Sayaka Murata’s Vanishing World and Olga Tokarczuk’s The Emposium.