In ‘Little Eve’, a pagan sect that worships vipers, with girls subjected to the abuse of their leader on a Scottish island who end up immolated in a stone circle. In ‘The house at the end of Needless Street’, a loner with strong limitations, eternal suspect of the murder of a girl, who lives with a cat who believes in God and receives visits from her daughter. But in the two novels by the writer Catriona Ward, published in the last 10 months in Spain, not everything is what it seems. The visions, hallucinations or distorted visions of the facts of the protagonists they are the puzzle (better meshed in the second of the novels) that the reader must really solve (more than the ‘whodunit’, the police subgenre that focuses on identifying who is the murderer, Ward plays who is (really) who.
And it is not by chance. The winner of the Shirley Jackson prize for mystery novel explains, in her visit to the Celsius 232, the Avilés Horror, Fantasy and Science Fiction Festival, what led him to this genre, in which he has triumphed internationally with ‘The house at the end of Needless Street’. It was his return each summer to a mansion on Dartmoor, in the Devon moors. “This experience that I had since I was 13 years old is the deepest terror I have ever experienced. I feel that I am introducing it in all my novels. In bed, I really felt a hand grab me from behind and pull me out of bed and make me walk. I still experience these hallucinations, even though by the time I was 30 they already had a diagnosis, like hypnanogic hallucinations, and I still have the same fear. It was terrible to discover that even if I moved house these experiences were with me, so it wasn’t the house that was haunted, it was me who had it inside. By discovering the gothic in the novel I think I discovered the perfect chest to put this fear, translating it into my novels Mystery novels are a good place to deal with fear and loss.”
‘The House at the End of Needless Street’
“And where to broadcast it,” he adds. Because on the other side there is a reader who is fascinated by horror: “What gives us terror is that we can have a space where we can talk, read, about things that we are not allowed to talk about when we grow up and become adults . Terror makes us feel less alone, since we think that there will be other people who will feel the same sensation that we feel before certain scenes. As a writer I put my fears in the pages I write and I hope that the reader will accompany me on the journey and feel the fear that I have deposited there.
Related news
With two novels already translated in Spain by Cristina Macía for the Runas publishing house, we can already see other constants in Ward’s work. The unreliable, misleading narrator: “The first-person narrator, whom we cannot trust, is -says Ward- what gives realism to the stories. We ourselves do not know what information is relevant, who to trust, what the people around us will do “. The elusive identities: “The scariest thing is not not knowing where the monster is, but not knowing what part of us is the monster. For me the most terrible thing is not knowing who you are, not knowing our inner secrets, exploring our deep selves. There is nothing more terrifying than not knowing yourself, not knowing what you’re capable of”. mental illness; but carefully: he celebrates not having thoroughly studied dissociative identity disorder (DID), formerly known as multiple personality disorder (PMD), until after he had written his novels: “It was better to deal with it from my abstract self, because when you write about real people you have to be very careful how you expose them. What I’m trying to do is not perpetuate horror genre stereotypes about mental illness. I think the perceptions of the people who suffer from them are not taken into account.”
‘Little Eve’
‘Little Eve’
And animals. A real or mythical viper in ‘Little Eve’. Olivia the cat in ‘The House at the End of Needless Street. Perhaps the character that her readers appreciate the most. A scene-stealing cat. “When I raised this character I already knew that she would be part of the central story but I did not know that he was going to take over the story in this way, which would be the moral center of the novel. Somehow, in addition to being an element that gives comfort, that reassures Ted, I think it is necessary for the reader, it provides a contrast with the dark narrative. It is the nature of cats, to own the limelight! In short, it’s the story of a cat who solves a crime.”