About the Book
A thrillingly weird novel about art, obsession, and the feral nature of female creativity.
Sabine is a conceptual artist whose latest show, Fuck You, Help Me, is about to launch, when her world begins to unravel. Stalked by a mysterious figure whose approaches grow increasingly threatening, she spirals deeper into her neuroses as exhibition day approaches and her fear transforms into something primal and untamed. Accompanied by her strange alter egos — from hyper-realistic baby puppets to the ghost of performance artist Caroline Schneemann — Sabine hurtles toward a surreal climax that forces a reckoning with what it means to create, to be seen, and to survive as a woman artist in a voyeuristic world.
Ella Baxter delivers a blazing work that dissects creativity and obsession with visceral humour and unflinching intensity. Part psychological thriller, part artistic manifesto, Woo Woo is a strange and haunting feast that pulses with rage and crackles with dark energy — a literary firestorm unlike anything else.
About the Author :
Ella Baxter is a writer and artist living on unceded land of the Wurundjeri people. In her spare time she runs a small business making bespoke death shrouds. Her debut novel, New Animal, was published in 2021. Woo Woo is her second novel.
Review :
‘A hyper-focused character study of a working artist in the age of platform capitalism. It at once lampoons and indulges the quirks of the self-marketing creative … As both a satire of the contemporary art world and a sincere portrait of the “chronically online” artist, Woo Woo effectively captures the emergent energies of a generation accustomed to transgression and feminism, but still struggling to metabolise these terms when a living woman embodies them.’
‘Ella Baxter cements herself as a novelist with a gift for exposing vulnerability under the surface of the absurd … [A] thoroughly bewildering exploration of exposure and autonomy, of seeing and being seen, through art and in life.’
‘Thrillingly weird, squirming with life, and throbbing with rage, Woo Woo often had me breathless and vibrating with delight. An incandescent howl of a book.’
‘Woo Woo — what a delight. Richly dark and funny, this exploration of art and meaning, of the feminine experience, of modern madness had me stopping to catch my breath. Brilliant, original, and loaded with the unexpected.’
‘Ella Baxter’s second novel is brilliant and profane, pretty much guaranteed to provoke the provokable and delight people who like weird feelings and private thoughts. It’s a wildly entertaining book, surprising on every page, and it dares you to wonder what the difference is, in life, between the dark bits and the fun bits.’
‘Baxter has somehow managed to create a work that is both lavishly excessive and tightly restrained. Woo Woo is a surreal fever dream but also an astute domestic portrait. It’s genuinely terrifying and laugh-out-loud funny. I’ve never read anything quite like it.’
‘Visceral, hyperreal, and hilarious — there is no book like Woo Woo and no writer like Ella Baxter. I loved every single stunning sentence.’
‘Sharp, clever, and wickedly funny, Baxter’s Woo Woo is an unsettling delight.’
’Equal parts freakshow and feast, artistic haunting and portrait of the artist as huntress — not to mention, funny as fuck. Ella Baxter’s prose is a force of nature.’
‘I wish I could have written this book. I don’t know how to do it justice. Woo Woo and its glorious, propulsive, feral protagonist mark a new frontier in fiction, where everything beautiful is laid out like a picnic, and we stomp on it. This book is hungry and hilarious, with prose so exquisite it makes me scream. I am in awe of Ella Baxter and her spectacular brain.’
‘Smart, razor sharp, and witty, Woo Woo takes us on a wild journey of female ambition, art, social media, stalkers, and dinner parties full of people with exquisite mullets vaping. I’ll read anything Ella Baxter writes — and Woo Woo is unmissable.’
‘Equal parts satire, ghost story, and fever dream, Woo Woo is sharply funny and thrillingly original. In her examination of artistic ambition, female rage, and the obsessions that haunt us, Ella Baxter proves to be an electrifying literary force. To read her fiction is to be in the company of a truly singular mind.’
‘Ella Baxter has created a frightening, brilliant and utterly invigorating novel, something that radiates, darkly, on your bedside table. Her sentences gleam like a knife held at night. Woo Woo captures the psychology of making art in the present, to be cut up and devoured online, flayed between discourse, and obscene acts live-streamed.’
‘Brimming with rich and visceral prose, Woo Woo elegantly traverses the realms of performance art, intimacy, and online surveillance. A wild odyssey, this book made me feel delightfully seen, and absolutely feral.’
‘A primal scream of selfhood into the toilet bowl of the art world. Feral, guttural.’
‘Ella Baxter’s Woo Woo is hysterically funny, a wild, unhinged journey into the heart of bewilderment. For Sabine, a conceptual artist, all of life, all of emotion, all human relationships, have the potential to become art. What does that mean when her newest exhibition nears, and a stalker makes himself known? This mordant, feral novel is an explosion of art and fury, and it is the best book I’ve read in a long while.’
‘Ella Baxter has written a mesmerising, strange, propulsive world of art and loneliness and sleep deprivation that swirls her readers around like wine in a glass, forcing us to reckon with who we are and what we believe. One of the few books about process and creation that doesn’t get lost in its own self-importance, Woo Woo is a novel people will want to talk about for years to come. Baxter is a master.’
‘Woo Woo is sharp and heady, the kind of writing that makes you feel slightly drunk and bewitched. Its exploration of creativity as a gothic haunting, as an indignity to be endured, is delicious, delightfully revolting and unlike anything you've read before.’
‘Woo Woo is a deeply enthralling, lowkey disturbing, and very funny portrait of an artist teetering at the edge of a spiral. I’m awestruck.’
‘A captivating meditation on art, obsession, and the difficulties women face while creating their work … Discomfort and vulnerability permeate the tale, a smolderingly disturbing yet often hilarious chronicle of Sabine’s fantastical interior world, a mental landscape characterised by a near-hallucinogenic commitment to her work … The book shines as a satire on the relentless blurring of reality and artifice within the art world … [R]eaders who enjoy capital-A Art will likely be enthralled by Baxter’s careful dissection of an artist at work.’
‘Bracing … Woo Woo is a sharp, scathing satire of the monstrousness of the contemporary art world — namely, its competitiveness, pretensions, and suffocating insularity. Baxter has an acerbic pen, aided by an ear for dialect — she wields both internet- and therapy-speak, not to mention the willfully opaque language of the art world, to great effect in skewering her target.’
‘The whirligig pace of the novel relentlessly intensifies from chapter to chapter as Sabine navigates the boundary between real and manufactured, all in front of a live audience … The book is a pointedly absurdist send-up of the pretensions of the art world, which nevertheless carries at its core a real exploration of what is at stake when one lives for art. Baxter continues her triumphant exploration of real lives lived on the fringes of the surreal. Sassy, sharp, and very funny, but with a consequential heart.’
‘Delightfully untamed … Baxter expertly builds suspense via Sabine’s increasing distress and the presence of the stalker, and she succeeds at keeping readers guessing at the line between reality and Sabine’s twisted perceptions. Those with a fondness for unreliable narrators will have a blast.’
‘Sure-to-be strange, sure-to-be-gripping … A new form of art monster rises over the horizon.’
‘At once a ridiculously funny satire on the art world and feminist rebuttal to bodies commodified in the name of creativity, Ella Baxter’s Woo Woo is a bizarre and astute reckoning with art itself.’
‘Curiously refreshing … [Baxter is] a crafty writer.’
