“Something wicked this way comes”: finding my Jenny Greenteeth

AUGUST 27, 2025

By David Renton

My novel, The Story of Jenny Greenteeth, is published today. The editors of Labour Hub have been kind enough to offer me this chance to explain why I wrote it. Around five years ago, during the early days of Covid, I was asleep at home when I dreamed of drowning. On waking, I was capable of summoning only the most meagre scraps of this encounter which were as follows: my face had been below the water’s surface with my feet far beneath me, I gasped for air, the water invaded my lungs and I could not breathe. That memory excited me. It felt authentic, real, and I wrote it down at the first chance.

When I thought about the dream, two obvious contenders presented themselves as explanations for why I’d reacted so strongly. At the age of one or thereabouts, but at any event before I was verbal, my parents took me sailing on their 30-foot, two-sail, yacht. At some point in the day, I fell into the water, whether from the boat itself or from the small rubber dinghy on which they liked to row to land while they left the yacht anchored to the sea floor. All I know is that my father plucked me out of the water. To this day, I still have stitching on the little finger of my right hand. My mother told me that my scar dates back to my rescue. Was I replaying this incident in my head; did I remember the event itself, or only being told about it? 

Here is the other possibility – when I was about 25 years old, I was walking one late December evening through Hackney on my way back to the room I rented. My partner suggested that we strip our clothes off and dive in the nearest canal. I, who’d drunk less than her, was horrified and objected, raising the cold, the dirt of the water, the risk of infection. Ever since, it has been one of those moments we tease each other about, a symbol of her recklessness or my caution, or possibly those values in reverse (that’s the thing about long-term relationships, you get to see all of the person you love, and their different reactions to similar opportunities). On the birth of our children, I wrote a love poem in which that moment became the fulcrum around which our relationship has turned. Maybe, as I dreamed, I was imagining what would have happened if I had indeed jumped into the water with her?

Within moments of waking from the dream, the conviction had settled on me that this incident meant enough so that I could write a novel exploring what exactly had been going on – either in the dream itself or in my enthusiasm at its memory. And there were other figures I’d be thinking about too – a wronged woman from the distant past, her accusers. Alongside them, I’ve long been mulling questions with which the book engages: the violence of the oppressed and its necessity; whether and when it’s right to forgive.

Quite a few novels, I suspect, have similar origins. Dracula, for example, is said to have begun at Bram Stoker’s waking from a dream; in his case, of being menaced by three inhuman women, plus a man who asserted his control, not of the women but over Stoker himself. That scene makes it into his novel’s early pages, just as mine is my story’s inciting incident.

My Jenny Greenteeth is a monster, a metaphor perhaps but of a wild and unchained sort, neither parable nor allegory. Readers who remember London in 2013, in the aftermath of the student protests and the London riots, will I hope find the atmosphere familiar. Tell me if the monsters frighten you, as they scare me. Let me know if you side with the book’s protagonist as she tries to make a principled way through a world not of her choosing. This is gentle, horror fiction, comrades. Urban horror, folk horror, but horror all the same. Read it if you believe that sometimes fiction can tell the truth about or world and its never quite closed-off possibilities.

David Renton is a barrister and the author of Against the Law: Why Justice Requires Fewer Laws and a Smaller State, which was published by Repeater in 2022 and of Horatio Bottomley and the Far Right Before Fascism, which was published by Routledge in November 2022. He blogs here.

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