Month: April 2025

I love novels set inside a house. The environment immediately creates a sense of claustrophobia, or at least, confinement, and the house itself becomes another character in the story. Think of Thornfield Hall in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre or Manderley in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. Thornfield Hall is an isolated, gothic manor permeated by a gloomy atmosphere that reflects the mood of Mr Rochester before he falls in love with Jane. And Manderley is a beautiful house, run by staff, filled with gracious objects that tell of the exquisite taste and sophistication of Rebecca, Max de Winter’s first wife, making our heroine, the new Mrs de Winter, feel inadequate in comparison. Everything in the house is still just as Rebecca wanted it, creating a feeling that the dead wife remains in control.

Sometimes the house in a story even stars in the title, like The House of the Spirits (Isabel Allende) and The Dutch House (Ann Patchett) to name just two.

From a hut on a mountain, to a cottage on a prairie, to a grand mansion on a country estate, the sort of house used as the setting will dictate what kind of characters inhabit it and, probably, the genre of story. The description of a dilapidated house can be used metaphorically to illustrate the crumbling nature of the relationships of those inhabiting it. A city high-rise flat can illustrate the sense of entrapment or loneliness a character is experiencing. Having locked rooms or hidden spaces in a house can be used metaphorically or physically to hide secrets. The position, size, décor, light, temperature and state of repair of the house all work to create a certain atmosphere. A house can be a symbol of status and wealth like the stately home in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited; it can be a gilded cage, like Gatsby’s mansion in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a house of horrors, like Dracula’s castle, or even a portal to another world, as in C.S Lewis’ Narnia novels, or Little, Big by John Crowley. If the novel is a family drama or comedy, the house could be a homely, straight-forward place, but it will have been carefully designed by the author to feed the mood of the story.

By setting a novel in a house, a writer allows readers to live with its inhabitants, the characters of the story, seeing them in a domestic, social setting, watching them interact with each other, getting to know them well. Confining the story within four walls narrows the perspective, focusing readers’ attention, in much the same way a stage play does. Everything becomes amplified in this environment – details become magnified; conversations highlighted.

If the book is a crime or mystery novel, this closed cast of characters can easily become a closed cast of suspects and/or victims. A house story is another version of the ‘locked room’ mysteries made famous by writers like Agatha Christie. ‘Locked rooms’ don’t have to be literal, they can be any confined, isolating location, like a train, a boat, an island or a house.

In One Dark Summer, Meg goes back to Deben Manor, the house she lived in as a child the summer her mother disappeared, and her uncle drowned. In some stories the house in question might be an obvious gloomy mansion that signals danger from the outset, or it could present itself as a comfortable, family environment, so that when something terrible or suspicious happens, the juxtaposition between surface appearance and the crime or suspicious event is even more unsettling and confusing. This is the kind of house I chose for One Dark Summer.

Deben Manor is a large, beautiful house that’s always been a family home, full of airy light, works of art, animals and children. It’s not an obviously scary place – but Meg comes to realise that nothing is what it seems as she begins to unearth lies and mistrust the intentions of her cousins. Not only that, but there’s a locked room in the attic, and despite what her cousins say, Meg knows there’s someone in there.

As my character, Meg, says in One Dark Summer, ‘memory is an act of the imagination,’ suggesting that it’s a fluid process, open to interpretation, distorted by perspective, coloured by our emotions, and therefore ultimately unreliable.

When I was writing One Dark Summer, I researched the fascinating subject of memory as I knew that for the purposes of my plot, my main character needed to be confused about the past and unable to recall a tragic event properly.

Scientists have named five stages of memory as encoding; storage; recall; retrieval; forgetting. The process of remembering begins with encoding something into our brain through visual (pictures), acoustic (hearing/sounds) or semantic (meaning) methods. Memories can then be accessed through recall, which is a passive form of remembering, or by retrieval, which is when we make an effort to remember through association and cues. Then comes forgetting, when memories are lost or jettisoned to make way for new or more important ones.

 As we know, the way we remember in our everyday lives can be influenced by our state of mind; if we’re stressed, distracted or disinterested, some memories won’t be properly encoded, making them hazy or vague. But when someone is subjected to a traumatic event, whole chunks of memory can be lost or distorted. During a traumatic experience, our brains often blank out events and details due to a psychological defence mechanism called ‘dissociation,’ where our brain goes into survival mode, walling off memory to protect itself from distress. This involuntary response leads to memory blanks and amnesia-like episodes. It’s known that trauma memories are malleable and prone to distortion. People tend to confuse the information generated after a traumatic event with what really happened – so follow-up conversations, news coverage and intrusive imagery infiltrate the brain and change the ‘real’ memory. After a traumatic event, despite blocking out the memory, the brain will still try to make sense of the experience, resulting in flashbacks and nightmares.

 Awful as this is for real-life victims of trauma, it makes for great fictional fodder. A character’s inability to remember correctly or to have a complete blank in their memory immediately creates tension and mystery and is a useful plot tool, particularly in a thriller or psychological suspense novel. As readers, we are seeking the truth. We want to know what ‘really happened,’ to make sense of a story, to untangle the threads. Often, in suspense novels, we’re given several different perspectives on an event through various characters’ conflicting memories, or perhaps just one character’s changing memories of the same event. We must work out which version to believe.

 In One Dark Summer, the main character, Meg, has blanked what happened the day she was involved in the sailing accident that resulted in her uncle’s death. Her remaining fragments of memory – a sudden gush of blood, the feel of a weapon in her hands – cause her to believe that she was in some way responsible for the tragedy. And it appears that her cousins also blame her for their father’s death. When, fifteen years later, Meg returns to the house where she lived the summer of the accident, she does so in the hope that it will trigger her lost memory to return.

 Fiction is our human way of making sense of the seemingly random nature of existence. A novel imposes structure on life in the form of a beginning, middle and end; it offers a moral, a meaning, a pattern. Suspense writing is the next level up. It takes the random nature of existence and stirs it up further, offering readers a baffling sequence of events, and crucially, a plot peppered with strategic black holes created by memory blanks and conflicting versions of events. The unreliable power of memory is always at play – pulling the proverbial rug from under our feet at every turn of the page. I love both reading and writing this kind of fiction. As a writer it offers the challenge of constructing the puzzle. As a reader, it offers the satisfaction of solving the puzzle, digging through false memories to find the true version of events and answer the riddle.