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I’ve Always Preferred the Haunted House
I’ve always preferred the haunted house.
Not literally. I like central heating and I’m fairly certain I’d move out immediately if I woke at three in the morning and found a dead Victorian child standing at the end of my bed.
But give me two houses in a book, one warm and bright with flowers in the windows and another at the end of a wet road with three locked rooms and something questionable going on in the attic, and I know where I’m going.
I grew up in Scotland, so perhaps some of this was inevitable. We have old things everywhere. Buildings, graveyards, ruins, bits of stone that have been sitting in the rain for hundreds of years. You grow up around it and don't think much about it.
Then you get older and realise you've spent your childhood surrounded by excellent places to hide bodies.
Maybe growing up around all that explains a few things.
I've been thinking about gothic stories a lot because I've spent the past while writing one. What I realised somewhere along the way is that it isn't really the supernatural part that interests me. I love a good vampire, obviously, but a vampire by herself isn't particularly frightening.
What interests me is not knowing.
You hear footsteps upstairs when you're certain nobody is there. Someone tells you they saw something in the garden, but nobody else saw it. A stranger turns up at the door and there's something slightly wrong about her, although you can't quite decide what.
You don't know whether to invite her in or quietly put the bolt across the door.
This brings me to Mara.
I've spent an unreasonable amount of time lately in a house in the Russian countryside in 1887. At least in my head. It belongs to Katya, who is nineteen and has lived there all her life. There is forest in every direction and not much happens there.
Then Mara arrives during a storm.
Barefoot.
I should mention that Katya has seen a pale woman before. She was six at the time. Nobody believed her.
Now there is a strange young woman in her house who sleeps through the afternoon, sends meals back untouched and seems to have an issue with mirrors.
Katya notices all of this.
She also happens to be rather taken with Mara, which complicates matters.
This is Devoured, the novel I've been living with for quite some time now. I'm getting close to the point where it doesn't feel like I've invented the house anymore. I know where Katya goes when she wants to be alone. I know which rooms are warm and which never seem to be. I know what's outside the windows.
There are parts of it I would quite like to visit.
Others, not so much.
And maybe that's the thing I've always loved about gothic fiction. You know something is wrong before you know what it is. Everyone has enough information to make the sensible decision, and then somebody wants something badly enough to ignore it.
Which is much more interesting.
If Katya had locked the door when Mara arrived, I wouldn't have much of a book.
And I probably wouldn't have let her in either.
Probably.
Raven x
