THERE’S a story about Jenny Hval which, given her lack of denial when I mention it, can probably be taken as truth, if not quite of the gospel variety.

It concerns a panicky meeting convened by producers at BBC Radio 3 in 2015 to discuss whether or not they should air Hval’s song Take Care Of Yourself. It’s about masturbation, which is reason enough for alarm. But it’s the explicit lyrics – featuring the C-word among others – that are really causing bother. To the station’s credit the song is eventually played, C-word and all, in one of those late-night slots reserved for artists at the more challenging and ideas-driven end of the rock spectrum.

That Jenny Hval qualifies for that label is unarguable. The 38-year-old started out as a teenager fronting a goth-metal band in her native Oslo before branching out on her own under the name Rockettothesky and then, in 2011, under her birth name. Her fourth studio album as Jenny Hval, 2016’s Blood Bitch, was a dense meditation on everything from vampires to menstruation and was on most taste-makers’ Best Of lists come the year-end. She draws heavily on performance art and brings to her blend of eerie soundscapes and leftfield electro-pop a barrel-load of ideas about feminism, gender and sexual identity, as well as a strong literary sensibility. It’s no surprise then that although she sings primarily in English, she also writes novels in her native Norwegian – three to date, and next month sees a welcome English translation of the first one, Paradise Rot.

Originally published in 2009 it tells the story of Jo, newly-arrived in a fictitious coastal town where she is to study mycology at the local university, and Carral, the enigmatic and ethereal young woman she befriends when she moves into her “flat” – which is actually a disused brewery re-purposed as a dwelling space through the addition of flimsy partition walls that offer scant privacy.

Jo, who has never had sex, listens intently to the sound Carral makes as she is urinating, splashing around in the bath or tossing fitfully in bed, and as the novel runs its fantastical course the women find themselves attracted to each other and to their male neighbour, Pym. Various trysts occur between the three, though each is shrouded in ambiguity and subjectivity. As Jo and Carral seem almost to merge into one the flat itself metamorphoses around them into a living thing whose floors and walls become covered with grass and, increasingly, mushrooms. The result is a jarring gothic confection of the hallucinatory, the ghostly and the kinky.

Hval wrote the novel at home in Oslo after time spent living in Australia, where she studied creative writing at the University of Melbourne. But she says neither Oslo nor the Victorian state capital are the models for the town of Aybourne, where the novel is set. You can look closer to home for that, at least in terms of the oppressive weather: Hval started writing Paradise Rot while sitting in Prestwick airport waiting for a flight back to Norway after a holiday with friends, and admits she was “imagining somewhere in Scotland” when she created Aybourne.

“I wanted to have somewhere which wasn’t so much related to exactly where I’d been myself,” she says. “It’s the same reason I chose to start my music career with a moniker instead of using my own name. It’s just to remove some kind of pressure from me in order to write.”

That ambiguity extends to the relationship between Jo and Carral. Hval’s intention in writing Paradise Rot, she says, was to “explore a bunch of feminist theory in a fictional setting, really explore those metaphors for female sexuality, see where that could take me”.

She also wanted to explore what she calls “the fluidity of female sexuality” by means of a character – Jo – who is “very much sitting in between, as so many people are. That’s why the mushroom is a motif that comes up several times: it doesn’t really have sexes like animals so on the one hand there’s a theme of being between understandings of gender and sexuality. But there’s also this idea of trying to explore the idea of female sexuality as something rotten or dirty and between states. Between the living and the dead.”

The result, as intended, is “a sort of fantasy story,” she says.

I suggest to Hval that I could see Paradise Rot making the transition to the big screen. She laughs – “It’s not the kind of literature that’s easy to sell” – but plays along in the game of Who Would Direct The Film Version? She agrees that a good fit would be David Cronenberg, the thinking person’s horror movie director, but plumps in the end for the iconic Agnès Varda, veteran of the French New Wave and still making thought-provoking films aged 90.

Given all that, readers won’t surprised to turn over Paradise Rot and see a back-cover commendation from American artist and writer Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick, the near-uncategorizable blend of memoir, novel, psycho-sexual confession and feminist critique which was recently turned into a Golden Globe-nominated TV series. In her blurb Kraus praises Hval for creating “a parallel world that’s familiar but subtly skewed” and calls her “a master of quiet horror and wonder”. It’s high praise.

“I’m very honoured just to know that she has read it,” says Hval. “I’ve been obsessed with her work since I read I Love Dick for the first time in 2012 and after that I read all her other books. She is an astonishing voice. She seems to come from outside the literary world. I feel she has created a space for a lot of readers and artists, and a way to understand art in a different way.”

Kate Bush is another heroine. Hval once wrote a thesis on the British singer. “It was about analysing song lyrics as they were sung instead of how we would read them on the page,” she says. “At the time I felt that Kate Bush was left out of the feminist canon a little bit, though that has changed a lot since. And I just wanted to write about how she sings words.”

How words are sung and how differently sung words are received compared to written words is something of an obsession for Hval. To her mind it goes to the heart of why her own lyrics are described as explicit (see BBC 3, above). “I think people haven’t been able to have the same space and time with song lyrics that they’ve had with books,” is how she explains it. “A lot of people have read a lot of books with all kinds of language in them. When you read novels, you get to experience this amazing empathy through the words. You understand character, why things are said, where people come from or why language exists in that particular context. But I don’t think there is that same tradition with pop music.”

If there was, she thinks, then people would have encountered in songs the same wide use of earthy and robust language that writers deploy in novels to describe the gamut of human activity.

“To me this is a problem because it means that a lot of my lyrics have been seen as if I am some kind of provocative artist using it [explicit language] in a tabloid and capitalist way, or just trying to do something with taboos,” she says. “To me it’s not about that at all. It’s just that I’m a musician but I write my lyrics using my experience from creative writing and from reading.”

Hval won’t be forsaking the sung word for the written word any time soon. She released a new four-track EP in May and undertakes a short UK tour next month. But the written word is reasserting itself in her career: as well as October’s publication of Paradise Rot she has finished a new novel whose title translates as To Hate God. It was published in Norway in August.

“It’s about religion, black metal, magic and Scandinavian whiteness,” she says. “I’m super-excited about it. I’m hoping it won’t take 10 years for it to be translated into English.”

That long a wait does now seem unlikely.

Paradise Rot is published on October 2 (Verso, £9.99)