“For here is the truth every farmer knows, all of England is a burial site. Every field is ghost soil. At that stretching hour of twilight, the temporal shades of the land shake at the corner of the eye. Call it history, call it a haunting. You choose.”
SLEEPERS IN THE SNOW is an atypical book, even for a writer known for writing across many genres. In fact, I think it’s different to anything I’ve done before. Written during the winter of 2024/5, it’s an exploration of place, of age, of solitude, and of memory. It’s also a kind of ghost story, although, as my unnamed protagonist writes, the ghosts of ourselves are the cruellest and the most frightening of all.
The story
It’s the story of an unnamed man, who buys an isolated house on the North York Moors unseen, in the wake of a bitter divorce. Moving into his new home – Kirkhill – in search of peace and solitude, he discovers that not only is the house built under a huge electrical pylon, but that it is still fully furnished, and filled with the previous owners’ possessions; clothes, books, personal items and furniture all untouched since the couple moved out two years before. Curious, he investigates, and learns that the erstwhile owners, Arthur and Caroline Sanderson, died together on the moor after a heavy fall of snow. Further investigation of the cottage reveals a series of journals written by Caroline, depicting her lonely years at Kirkhill, and Arthur’s increasingly erratic behaviour, his paranoia and his obsession with the pylon. And as life in his new home takes a frightening new turn, Kirkhill’s new owner begins to realize that things in the house are not as they seem, that no-one is as they appear, and that Arthur and Caroline are not the first to have died under the pylon…
Background
I wrote the first draft of SLEEPERS very fast, over the course of about three months, which is the time the story spans. It begins as I began it, in the autumn of 2024, and ends in the middle of winter. My father had died that summer, after years of ill-health and dementia, and after his death, my mother, who had cared for him at home, quickly and efficiently swept the house of all trace of him. Clothes, diaries, photographs – even his wedding ring – were disposed of overnight, so that no sign of him remained. She didn’t want a funeral. I recovered a box of his things that had been marked for disposal, including the ring, the book he’d been reading (a French thriller, which he’d been re-starting over and over for years) and the little notebooks he used every day to document his life – trivial things, including lists of names and words that he wanted to remember. There were several years’ worth of these notebooks, maybe a dozen in all; all closely-written in French, and illustrating his gradual decline. These books, both poignant and mundane, inspired some of the entries in Arthur’s journal. Later, I found that some of the books had disappeared: I searched the house from top to bottom, but to date, the notebooks are still missing. I sometimes wonder if they disappeared from the real world in order to stay in the story. In any case, the theme of things disappearing (and sometimes reappearing unexpectedly, and in unsettling circumstances) became a recurring theme in the book, as did the themes of lost memory , lost love, lost time. Is it a ghost story? I don’t know. There are certainly ghosts in there. But who is living and who is dead? And does it matter? You decide.
Themes and influences.
As with many of my books, SLEEPERS deals with the idea of perception, and how it is shaped by neurology: in this case, by grief, guilt and the onset of dementia. My narrator is unreliable by virtue of his mental state – but does he believe what he’s saying? Undoubtedly he does, but that doesn’t mean you have to.
Folklore plays an important part, too: quoted throughout the book is an ancient ballad, the Lyke Wake Dirge, an anonymous funeral chant which dates back to the 14th century, and which follows the journey of the “lyke” (corpse) through various trials of the afterlife on its way to Purgatory. The famous Lyke Wake Walk passes through the North York Moors, where this story is set, between Scarth Moor to Ravenscar, and the folkloric details mentioned in the book – corpse roads, mythical beasts, hogsback graves and Neolithic grave sites – are all authentic, although the village of Lyke is my own invention.
Here too is the opposition between man and the landscape, as symbolized by the pylon. One of the literary influences for SLEEPERS is L.P. Hartley‘s (“The past is a foreign country...”) unsettling little short story, The Pylon, which encompasses everything I have always found terrifying and fascinating about electricity pylons. I also owe a debt of gratitude to David Southwell, creator of Hookland, who provided me with the opening quote for the book (as well as the character of Dr Benn), and whose views on folklore, imaginary landscapes and the psychogeography of the British Isles seemed so much in alignment with the world of Arthur and Caroline.
And as always, scent plays its part: in this case, The Lion Cupboard, by 4160 Tuesdays, an eerie, evocative fragrance which gave me the scent of Caroline’s wardrobe, and the scent narrative of the novel.
Questions.
Q: Was it hard, writing SLEEPERS? It’s so very different from VIANNE…
A: In some ways it was: but I’ve always written the book that wanted to be written at any given time, and this book needed to be written. VIANNE was a summer book, a kind book, warm and filled with flavours. SLEEPERS is a winter book, filled with snow and silences. In some ways it’s an exorcism of the events leading to my father’s death: in another it’s an attempt to make sense of something essentially unknowable.
Q: Do you believe in ghosts?
A: Not in the traditional way: but I do believe we can be haunted, and that hauntings can take many forms.
Q: This is quite a scary book. Did you scare yourself writing it?
A: Fear is a very personal thing. We all feel it in different ways, and from different sources. In this book I tried to tap into our universal fear of the unknown and of the irrational, not through the traditional monsters of horror fiction, but through the monsters of the mind. And yes, that scares the hell out of me.
Q: What’s with all the tennis balls? And why are they so creepy?
A: I’ve always found that ordinary things behaving in unusual or unexpected ways are more frightening than the things we expect to frighten us. The tennis balls – and the coffee cups – are examples of this – prosaic items glimpsed in a different, unsettling context – a sign that something is wrong with the world.
Q: Why use the Lyke Wake Dirge as the leitmotif of the novel?
A: Partly because of the moorland setting, and partly because I wanted to introduce the concept of the afterlife into the story in both a traditional and a non-traditional way. The Dirge runs parallel to my protagonist’s journey, like an old road running under a modern highway – but both lead to the same place. It’s just a metter of perspective.
Q: Why choose an electrical pylon as the main image in this book, and what does it represent?
A: I wanted something to illustrate man’s attempt to dominate and conquer the landscape. Pylons are ubiquitous; we find them everywhere, even on some of our most sacred sites, and yet they are ephemeral features, just waiting to be replaced by something else. In this book, the pylon is a symbol of man’s inability to conquer the land, as well as his futile attempts to communicate with others. My protagonist is alone, in spite of all the devices that are meant to link him with the outside world; and all it takes is a fall of snow to cut him off completely.
Q: So, which is it – folk-horror or literary fiction?
A: I don’t find genre easy to define, and besides, I think this novel can be both. I don’t think SLEEPERS is horror in the conventional way; although the horror genre covers a range of possibilities. Nor is it strictly folklore, although folklore does play a part. This book is about the horror of everyday things; of the disintegration of a mind; of the shapes we imagine in the dark; of the things we refuse to see. I think these fears are universal: you can find them in the Lyke Wake Dirge, written 700 years ago. So yes, it’s a horror novel in the sense that it taps into universal fears: but whether they are natural or supernatural fears is up to the reader to decide.