Usually, I reserve this website for reviews of others’ fiction. In this case, however, I hope you’ll indulge me as I announce that my new novel, The Inhabitants, will be published in September.
This novel is my grownup take on the types of stories I most liked to write as a kid: tales of haunted spaces, and what happens to those who enter them, intentionally or by circumstance.
Although I’ve long been a fan of ghost stories, that has been perhaps my biggest impediment to writing one as an adult. How, I asked myself, could I possibly create one as chilling and strange as my favorite tale of the supernatural, The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James? The answer, of course, is that I can’t, and didn’t. Yet it was fun to take up the challenge of writing a novel that tries to engage readers on a psychological level, that aims to spark the darkest parts of their imaginations, as James did so brilliantly. In the process, I tried to bear in mind something that Joanna Briscoe observed in The Guardian: “The power of a ghost story lies in what is feared beneath the surface of the narrative, terrors glimpsed or imagined in the cracks, rather than what leaps out of the shadows.”
So what’s The Inhabitants about? Here’s the book-jacket copy:
If you’d like, you can pre-order the novel here. If you do, thanks very much (and I hope you enjoy it)!
Would My Pick be Your Pick?
If you're interested in ________, the answer may be "Yes":￭ Ghost stories
￭ Horror
￭ Gothic novels, such as The Turn of the Screw
￭ Stories about artists and how art is made
￭ Explorations of grief
