Lulu Allison is a talented literary fiction author and artist whom I met in 2018 in North London when her first book, Twice the Speed of Dark, was launched. We shared the same publisher. I got to know Lulu better when she became my art teacher during the years of the pandemic. She inspired our small class, providing comfort and intellectual and creative stimulation from the boredom of COVID. I had never produced as much art as then. It was a time of innocence and “lockdown art”. The only thing that provided me any excitement was Lulu’s art class called Middle Distance Arts. I looked forward to it every week. Lulu’s third novel, Beast, is due to be published by Bluenose Books on 31 July 2025, following the critical success of her second novel, Salt Lick, which was long‑listed for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2022. Her unsettling prose is lyrical yet grounded, blending mythic elements with sharp social realism. Please welcome Lulu, this post’s guest blogger for Write Ngeow Blog, a blog curated by me.
Guest blog by Lulu Allison
A question arose when I was reading Thomas Mann’s novel, Doctor Faustus, and thinking about Robert Johnson, the blues musician, who myth has it, went to the crossroads to make a deal with the devil, swapping his soul for success and talent. What if Johnson and the many other musicians associated with the Faust myth had been reaching into the cosmos for the divine? What if it was their fate that a demon was the one to answer their call?
What if all that was on offer for the price of their soul was the glitz of earthly reward? What if Robert Johnson had wanted access to the divine in order to move people in extraordinary ways, rather than to find fame and fortune? It seemed a reasonable question, given that the act of music making is so often entwined with the desire to create wonder, uplift, dread – to engage all the ways a human can be moved.
I later learned that Thomas Mann had based his central character Leverkuhn, on the composer Arnold Schoenberg, as an act of homage, but that they had fallen out because Schoenberg took offence at the implication that there was a supernatural source to his musical invention. This led me to ask, in relation to the Faust myth, what is the nature of desire? What do we want and for what purpose? To be elevated amongst our peers or, more nobly perhaps, in service of music that is capable of uplifting others? My novel Beast grew out of these questions.
About Lulu
Lulu Allison is a contemporary fiction author.
Her next book, Beast, will be published by Bluemoose Books on 31 July 2025
Her previous novel, Salt Lick, selected for the Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist in 2022, is available directly from this site and other outlets.
Synopsis
Eve, a young self-taught musician, reaches for the divine in her music and in so doing, she awakes Demon, who must, in obedience to ancient lore, come to make a trade for Eve’s soul. On his way to her, he finds Rabbit at a field edge. He picks Rabbit up, conferring borrowed divinity upon him. Rabbit becomes Demon’s comfort and his companion. It is Rabbit who tells the tale of Demon’s attempts to secure Eve’s soul.Find Lulu here