Jason, a young male writer who appears in my novel Sweep the Cobwebs Off the Sky, remarks scathingly at one point that “People call anything and everything gothic nowadays. They just throw that word around as if it’s cool. All you have to do is piss in a doorway at night and some arsehole will call it a gothic event down a dark alley.”
I don’t agree with Jason myself, and trace my interest in something that continually tilts and pokes at what we term reality in storytelling partly to my own disposition, which favours the wild, unwieldy and unsettling, and also to my father and grandmother, both indiscriminate readers of all kinds of literature. With bright imaginations that worked quietly behind the carapace of daily life, they whetted my appetite for stories of disturbed doings in average-looking places around the countryside. Tranquil narratives and poems weren’t ever my bag, and when my father once referred jocosely to my novel, The Elysium Testament, as “the product of a crazed imagination”, he was half joking but wholly in earnest. I didn’t mind. I knew what he was getting at.
Early on I discovered the literature of the unsettling and ended up loving the weird and the ghostly, thanks to my grandmother’s tales of the pooka, while my father’s appetite for Edgar Allen Poe and WW Jacobs further stoked the coals of my private mind. Some commentators refer to this kind of storytelling as gothic. It follows through an actual “story” without sticking to conventional narrative planes so much as moving circuitously down unexpected paths of not-quite-rational thought, creating intriguing, anxious portals to the unconscious.
When young, I knew instinctively that it wasn’t something to discuss with certain people. The phenomena of the ghostly pressed against the outer contours of a practical local and family community, where life was characterised by a sturdy work ethic more to do with getting ahead in life than dwelling on tall tales and eerie yarns. For me, slightly disturbing narratives to do with Co Wexford’s Loftus Hall (cloven hooves on gleaming young gentlemen!), Fermanagh’s satanic The Coonian Ghost, vampires such as Le Fanu’s Carmilla (which predates Stoker’s Dracula), John Buchan’s Scottish tale The Watcher by the Threshold and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw paradoxically brought a sense of relief and adventure to my inner life.
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Despite social and political changes in Ireland during the 1960s and 1970s, another world awaited me every night when I retreated to bed, a low light filtering from the landing through the dark glass of my bedroom door. I couldn’t have identified at the time how some of my reading in part formed an aspect of my holding back from several worlds within which I was temporarily locked. For one thing there was the fracture that developed when my parents adopted a six-month-old baby when I was almost six years old. Within the old and beautiful home that all four of us loved – mother, father, sister and I – things crumbled and frayed that as a child I could not understand. Beyond home, we were witnessing the fracturing world a few miles northwards in which a lethal and unforgiving war was unfolding. The Troubles began to peak, the Republic struggled. Meanwhile, our parents struggled too, both of them charming, lovely and human, misguided and unsupported.
For me, reading of the supernatural and weird was a way of living obliquely and at a peaceful distance from difficult things. And I was a dreamer watching young contemporaries from across the Border who attended the town’s discos and dances at weekends. When the national anthem was played at the end of the night, their posture was different, they clasped their hands behind their backs, indicating a different – a new – order of Irishness that made me feel fearful. And I couldn’t have explained why, even though I was surrounded by other, conviction-filled youngsters.
Other things influenced me. A long illness as a teenager contributed to a search for things that echoed the upended world I now inhabited. Returned from hospital and back at school, my friendship groups had shifted, but I continued to read about the supernatural, a fashionable subject among a tiny cohort of us – Dennis Wheatley, satanism and ouija boards were big, there were car trips out to the ruins of the neo-gothic Rossmore Castle at night, visits to the old family mausoleum, allegedly haunted, and tales of unnatural hornets that flew out at night on the attack.
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I had a beefy imagination, easily inflamed, quite suggestible. For most people, an interest in this kind of literature is a passing, youthful thing, in retrospect possibly carrying a cringeworthy factor. But not for me, because it persisted. Throughout my life I have returned to the world of the in-between, lingering in Dickens’s The Signal Man, Shirley Jackson’s terrifying The Haunting of Hill House, Elizabeth Bowen’s The Demon Lover, and writers such as Daphne du Maurier, Ann Radcliffe, and Emily Brontë. My appetite for the eerie has never deserted me and I continue to search it out in contemporary forms, from Andrew Michael Hurley’s Starve Acre to Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, curious to see where and how either the horror folk tale or the unsettling non-rational finds its space in modern fiction that is not actually labelled “fantasy”.
Twenty-seven years ago in my novel The Elysium Testament I addressed the question of a five-year-old boy’s nemesis appearing as a Doppelgänger, or apparitional twin. To the dismay of his mother, he could also levitate in perfectly contemporary conditions. I bypassed this kind of thing in my 2014 published novel Where They Lie, instead involving my characters in a sometimes chilling search for the bodies of two of the Disappeared and exposing memory in all its unreliable manifestations.
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Yet I can’t leave the emotional spaces and traces of unresolved feeling and history alone. My new novel – begun in a rented cottage in Co Wexford the week before the first lockdown in 2020 – is all about the blighted – sometimes comical, sometimes tragic – emotional contortions within a family. And in the case of the Esmonds of fictional Kilnavarn House in Co Monaghan, the house itself is a character in its own right, exerting a supernatural influence on a protagonist whose bedroom is haunted. It forms a grumbling undertone to the book, with minimal scare factor, and in the writing and shaping I wanted to reveal my protagonist Frankie’s unnerved mind but not through the lens of pure social realism. In the struggle to care for her 92-year-old frail mother in the old homestead, she recalls the abusive relationship witnessed as a child, and so I needed to take her response symbolically to a different level, neither higher nor lower so much as what I view as a parallel aspect to our daily world.
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I also remember what it was like to sleep in a room in which the nights were often beset – in the deep darkness of those unlit years in the countryside – by a continuous “scratching” sound (as in the novel), which sometimes seemed to move around the room. I got used to it, never having discovered what it was, and learned to ignore it. But sometimes it was unsettling. After several years I traced the sound to nothing more threatening than a couple of bats behind a window shutter, and the problem was sorted. Bats shoved out, access boarded up, shutter closed and silent forever more.
Nonetheless, the feelings I associate with that time, and my own sense of being out of kilter with the world around me have found a place in the fictive Sweep the Cobwebs Off the Sky, which uses the partly imagined geography of a drumlin landscape to explore family, memory and bewildering bonds.
Although the poltergeist that inhabits Kilnavarn House derives from an experience of “bats in the bedroom”, when I looked into the question of genuine poltergeist activity and the kind of people affected by it, I realised that my character Frankie – quirky, oppositional, fearful, a little flirtatious and a little repressed, doing her utmost as she struggles with flashbacks – is one of those niche characters who might attract such activity. On several occasions in her bedroom, she is beleaguered by the invisible nocturnal scratchings of one of the house’s previous owners, a 19th-century freedom fighter and wanderer, busy with his quill pen. Certain items are interfered with – a glass is moved, lampshades swing for no reason and strange, cat-like odours permeate the house. Desperate for emotional safety from her own memories of childhood, my protagonist possesses a lifetime’s habit of avoiding hurt, and tolerates these manifestations.
I strongly believe that this is how some adults proceed: they seek safety from an injured nervous system borne from childhood despite outwardly “normal” family relations. But perhaps acknowledging the evidence of the irrational is a release from pain, also how the Larkinesque mums and dads who “f**k you up”, in turn create their own spectres, some of which are never quite visible until much, much later in life.
To me, “gothic” represents what we have largely dispensed with in a hyper-rational world that directs the raging shadow side of the human personality through more tempered, acceptable psychologies. In literature I find it both cool and kick-ass joyous. Because gothic fiction fights. Gothic resists. Without knowing it, my antecedents passed me a gift that remains relevant to how we deconstruct the world before reconstructing it again. It absolutely isn’t Hollywood fantasy, so much as an invaluable method of mapping the imagination. In other words it’s mad, bad and I love it.
Sweep the Cobwebs Off the Sky is published by Epoque Press on March 19th
