The Oldest Bitch Alive by Morgan Day
A perfect blend of absurdity and philosophical musing, this novel takes on the perspectives of Gelsomina, an elderly French Bulldog, and the worms that are killing her. Controlled from the outside by the confines of her owners and now from the inside, Gelsomina provides us with beautiful meditations on autonomy, love, and the meaning of life. There is a stark contrast created by the pairing of heavy introspective text with base desire and the simple reality of existing that serves to better carry these complex themes, and it carries them well. The nauseating intimacy of parasitism is not to be forgotten and can even be found in the most surprising of places, like reflections on the glass house Gelsomina lives in. I find it almost hard to believe this is a debut novel, and I am ecstatic to see experimental works like these published.
The Oldest Bitch Alive by Morgan Day, (List Price: $28, Astra House, 9781662603372, March 2026)
Reviewed by Oliver, Epilogue: Books Chocolate Brews in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
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I know a lot of fairy tales.
Like I cut my teeth on them. I grew up reading lots of fairy tale collections, and I realized I could only with difficulty think of fairytales where women were friends, where women talk to each other, and where they weren’t antagonists to each other in some way. I know they’re there, but the fact that I could reach for 10 stories of women waiting for rescue or women waiting to be chosen or women seeking husbands or, you know, that sort of thing instead of a story of women setting out together to have adventures—which is really what I wanted to tell my 7 year old niece who is asking me for a fairy tale— It was very disturbing to me, and I just remember in that moment thinking I’m just going to make something up. I’m gonna make something up because I really want her to know that there is room in fairytales for girls to be friends.
I hope I don’t give too much away, but I was quite inspired by Witness, with Harrison Ford amongst the Amish. I was really interested in this idea of a gangster amongst peacemakers, which is really what Witness is. I find that really fascinating. I became interested in Celtic Christianity because it was very revolutionary at the time in ways that we slightly forget. This was a world of utter warlordism, a very, very violent world and it was pagan. All of that was predicated on the idea that it was good to be strong and kill people. If gods were with you, that’s what would happen. If gods weren’t with you, you’d be weak. The idea of a religion that was founded on the idea that you might want to be weak, or you might want to be humble, was completely insane to these people. I mean, they looked at it and just went, “You’re mad! What are you talking about?”
“Why was Anne Boleyn executed? This was a question I asked myself when writing The Beheading Game, in which Anne Boleyn wakes up after her own execution, escapes from her grave in the Tower of London, sews her head back on, and goes on a revenge quest to kill Henry VIII before he can marry his next wife, Jane Seymour. Legally, the answer is she was executed because she was convicted of the crimes of treason, adultery and incest, but most historians today agree those charges were probably false. So, how did Anne go from being a queen consort, steps from the seat of English power, to climbing the steps to the scaffold in a matter of months? Sometimes the simplest explanation is the most likely, and, although I came to many answers to this question during my research, all of them circled around one central theme: misogyny.”
“When we think of environmental disaster or climate change, we often think of catastrophic events—the Californian or Australian wildfires, deadly floods in Bangladesh or Pakistan, a destructive typhoon or hurricane. When events like those becomes the point of focus, we stop thinking about other kinds of destruction and degradation. I wanted to find a way to reveal what Rob Nixon called slow violence. I didn’t want the major catastrophes to entirely dominate the novel; I wanted to bring slower instances of change to the foreground.”
