I’m currently going through the querying process with my second novel, a folk horror piece, titled, ‘Don’t let them take the children.’ The story is set in the Welsh mountains in the 1980s and starts in the familiar territory of teenagers investigating haunted houses, but in true folk horror style evolves into a more gruesome and darker tale with plenty of twists and turns. To date, it has been read by over fifteen beta readers and the feedback – I’m pleased to say – has been very positive.
I’ve loved the whole process of writing a horror novel. This is a genre that continues to excite and thrill me. Many of my favourite films (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Hereditary, The Witch) and books (Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Haunting of Hill House, The Woman in Black, early-to-mid Stephen King) are horror in nature. Much like quality sci-fi, great horror is often more about the change in people as a result of their experiences and actions rather than the circumstances or nature of whatever is terrorizing them. Fear is a great way of pushing characters to adapt and change in accordance with their underlying needs and inner truths. Some of the best horror stories align the right supernatural forces with the right flawed protagonists (Joe Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box springs to mind on this point). The main character of my novel is a boy who obsessively investigates haunted houses after the death of his mother. The reality of the antagonistic forces he comes up against is quite different from what he expects to face. The path he takes and the barriers he must overcome push him to challenge the mindset that was shaped his loss.
The choice of setting was one I was most familiar with and believed had great potential for horror (i.e., Welsh countryside in the eighties), being where and when I grew up, and I was fascinated by the paranormal, hence there are some definite autobiographical elements to the story. I did try and arrange paranormal investigations of haunted sites with my friends/squad members. At one point, after a spate of sightings of a hooded figure around the village I lived in, I arranged stakeouts of sites where said ‘spook’ had been sighted. A high point was when I convinced a boy who lived on a nearby farm and who had a knack for drawing to attend an investigation. I didn’t have a camera and in lieu of any photographic equipment, this seemed like a good idea. The brief for our squad artist was as follows: at the graveyard, we’ll coax out the hooded figure (how we planned to do this I don’t know); you hide in the bushes with your pencils and a pad, and when you see it, start sketching. Looking back, I can see flaws in my plan, but, as they say, hindsight is a wonderful thing.
