 about catherine cavendishHello, my name's Catherine Cavendish and I write horror fiction - frequently with ghostly, supernatural, Gothic and haunted house themes. My latest novel - THE GARDEN OF BEWITCHMENT - is out now from Flame Tree Press. Historical haunted Gothic horror set in the wilds of the Yorkshire moors - pure Bronte country - with a Bronte theme. My novella - THE DARKEST VEIL - is published from Crossroad Press. In case you were thinking of messing with an ouija board - don't. Especially if you're not prepared to follow the rules. Also from Flame Tree Press - THE HAUNTING OF HENDERSON CLOSE. Ghostly horror set in Edinburgh's Old Town. Available now from Kensington-Lyrical - the NEMESIS OF THE GODS trilogy: WRATH OF THE ANCIENTS, WAKING THE ANCIENTS and DAMNED BY THE ANCIENTS - set in Egypt and Vienna and featuring the sinister Dr. Emeryk Quintillus whose obsession has stayed with him long past the grave. My novellas COLD REVENGE, MISS ABIGAIL'S ROOM, THE DEMONS OF CAMBIAN STREET, DARK AVENGING ANGEL, LINDEN MANOR, THE DEVIL INSIDE HER and THE SECOND WIFE have now been released in new editions by Crossroad Press. My novels THE DEVIL'S SERENADE and SAVING GRACE DEVINE have also been released in new editions by Crossroad Press, as has my novel of the Lancashire Witches - THE PENDLE CURSE. I live with a long-suffering husband and a delightful black cat who has never forgotten that her species used to be worshipped in ancient Egypt. She sees no reason why that practice should not continue. Who am I to argue? When not slaving over a hot computer, I enjoy wandering around Neolithic stone circles and visiting old haunted houses. an interview with catherine cavendishYour new novel The Gardens of Bewitchment is out now from Flame Tree Press. Would you be able to tell us a bit about it? It’s set in 1893 and it centres around two sisters. They’re actually identical twins. Their faces are identical to look at, but they’re very very different in personality and the way they present themselves. So that’s Claire and Evelyn, Evelyn known as Ev by Claire. They have left their home, their family home in a prosperous town in the heart of the Pennines, and they’ve chosen to live in a small cottage in a little village near to Hawoth because they are both absolutely devoted to the Brontës. Claire in particular is infatuated with the Brontë brother, Branwell Brontë, who died in 1848 but as far as Claire’s concerned Branwell is still very much alive and visits her. The only thing is, things are not what they appear to be at all. It’s not a straight forward ghost story, there is a lot going on there, especially when Claire finds, miraculously it has appeared in her room, this toy called The Garden of Bewitchment. Which seems like a lovely beautiful thing to play with… but it isn’t. That’s where the fun starts! There’s a big influence of the Brontës on the feel of the novel. Was that something you wanted to play with? Yes, very much so. For a long time I’ve thought I’d love to do something involving Wuthering Heights, particularly because that’s my sort of go to Brontë book. I mean I love Jane Eyre as well and also Agnes Grey, Anne Brontë’s story, but there’s always been something about Wuthering Heights. It’s a book that when I got hooked on it when I was a child, I would fetch it out and read it at least once a year, and as I grew up, I saw different things in that book. The atmosphere of it, the whole gothic feel of it, the sinister stuff that goes on there, the ghostliness that goes on there, and the incredible moors. Now I’m writing horror myself and I’m thinking, there’s a story in there that I wanted to write and I couldn’t see how to do it. And it fermented and fermented and fermented in my mind for a very long time. So I finally thought, yes, that’s what I’m going to do. Branwell Brontë is the brother who had a troubled history with alcoholism and never achieved the same heights as his sisters. What drew you, and your characters, to him? I think that’s what it is. Branwell I find a tragic character in so many ways, because as you say he was in the shadow of his sisters. He was expected to do well. His family regarded him as a talented artist, and of course, he suffered a serious setback, that turned out to be ultimately fatal in his case, when the Royal Academy wouldn’t have anything to do with him. And I think as far as Claire, my character is concerned, she’s attracted to him because he is a bad boy. You know, that’s just Claire. Ev wouldn’t have given him house room, it just wouldn’t have happened for Ev, but for Claire, oh yes. Most assuredly. Claire is drawn because he is the total opposite of what she should be considering. Both The Garden of Bewitchment and your previous novel The Haunting of Henderson Close have really vividly imagined specific settings. How important is setting to your writing? For me it’s really, exceptionally, important. It’s critical actually. I love getting involved in the setting of the book. When I’m writing, I’m actually there. That’s why I never have music playing, I don’t have any distractions, I work in a quiet room, surrounded by books as it happens, which is lovely. And it’s just me and the computer and what’s going on in my head, my characters moving around in my head. And they’re moving around in a place. And that place is very very three dimensional in my head. So it’s critical to me, I love to paint that particular scene, especially when it involves darkness, winds, gales, yes stormy conditions, that kind of thing. At the centre of the book is the Garden of Bewitchment itself, which is a very creepy toy. What is it about kid’s toys that disturb us? To start off I think that certain toys are very scary. Clowns. They’re the classic. I’ve never liked clowns, even when I was a kid, I used to find them very spooky and sinister. Pennywise - that definitely resonated with me when I read it! But also dolls, and I know a lot of people don’t like it but I happen to love the Conjuring universe. Vera Farmiga I think has done a lot for our whole genre actually by bringing those out. Annabelle is a scary doll. Chucky was a scary doll. But an awful lot of stuff has been done already. I would have loved to have done a scary doll, but I thought it’s just been done. I have actually got a scary doll in one of my previous books, but it’s not really a major character. But I thought no I can’t do a doll. It just formed in my head, I thought, well what about a doll’s house, and then the doll’s house became a house in a garden, and it kind of grew and grew and grew, and as I was writing it it grew. And it didn’t have a working title as The Garden of Bewitchment, I can’t even remember if it did have a working title until I finished the first draft! The sisters have a shared fantasy world that they write books in, which has parallels with the Brontës and Glasstown…. Oh yes definitely. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Hawoth, but in the Brontë parsonage you can actually see these tiny little books that they wrote. And it’s extraordinary, because the writing is so so tiny, you think well how can a human, even a child - well especially a child - have written it. It’s so exquisite, you can’t read it, you need a magnifying glass. They must have written it with a magnifying glass. It was obvious to me that as soon as I decided I was going to take the tack that I took, that those two sisters of mine were going to have to have this thing about creating their own little world like Glasstown and Angria and so on. It really makes them. And then it kind of just grew from there, and yes the crossover between fantasy and reality, and the blurring of the lines of what is real and what isn’t real. There’s a lot of that in Garden of Bewitchment in different ways, and it’s something I loved playing with. It seemed to work. You’ve mentioned that you used to write historical fiction, which is interesting because that’s a particularly strong element in your latest book but some of your other ones as well.. Yes. I’m living the dream really at the moment, because I love history. I’ve loved history since I was at school, a bit of me I’ve inherited from my mum. So I loved writing historical stuff, but then I love writing the ghostly horror stuff as well, so what do you do? You write historical horror, it’s the best of both worlds! Does getting the period detail right involve a lot of research? Yeah it can do, just to get the absolute details right. You’ve got to be careful about the language that you use because some words, it really grates on me when I read a book that is supposed to be historical and then they’ll come out with some word that didn’t come into parlance until the 1960s or 70s or 80s or even later. So there are some words which I sort of think, ooh hang on, would they have said that? Fortunately now we have the internet haven’t we, so we can consult an online dictionary and straight away find out when that word was incorporated into common parlance. But the devil is in the detail, you do have to take care with that. But again I love this whole business of research, I really enjoy it. I often do research, I keep the windows open on the computer here that’s linked to some site about whatever it is I’m working on at the time and I’ll keep dashing backwards and forwards between those, making sure again I’m not going too off course, without giving my readers a history lesson, because obviously they don’t want that. They want something scary to happen. But they want it to be authentically scary! When you have a particular idea, because the historical elements and the setting are so strong in your work, do you always know where and when it needs to be set? Yes it just seems to fall into place, absolutely. That was the case particularly with Henderson’s Close, with the character of Miss Carmichael, who of course, she dies at the beginning. She’s actually inspired by a gravestone. In Greyfriar’s kirkyard in Edinburgh, on the wall there is a plaque that says Miss Casscart, and that’s all it says. And if you ask the staff in the church, they don’t know anything more about it, other than that. Who was Miss Casscart? When did she live? Why did somebody put up that plaque, who put that plaque there? They know nothing, they don’t know anything about it. And that’s where Henderson’s Close, the story that we actually now have, came from, was initially that little gravestone there, and I’m thinking, I wonder who she was? And I tried to do my own research and I could only come up with, funnily enough, two sisters, who possibly fit the bill, around about the time that I was guessing she was probably alive. It was all guesswork, so that kind of became the period, because I sussed these people out living when they did, that’s when I wanted to set a chunk of Henderson’s Close, and the rest of it I wanted in the present day. Do you feel the historical element is useful for reflecting at a distance on aspects of the present? There is that aspect of Ev and Claire’s status as women who are very much expected to live their lives in a particular way, and they both rebel against that in very different ways… Yeah. I think if you tried to set that story in the present day it wouldn’t work, because women are not expected to behave like that. And obviously, Ev and Claire kind of broke the mold, cause really they should have in the scheme of things married well, but that was, well it didn’t happen. It didn’t happen to the Brontës apart for Charlotte, and even she married beneath her according to her father! It wasn’t really that but he didn’t approve of her marrying. He didn’t think it was the right thing for her, didn’t think her constitution would stand being married. We won’t explore that any further! You have two novels out with Flame Tree Press and Crossroad Press have put out some of your earlier work. What has your experience been of working with these two different publishers? Very different ways of doing things. Flame Tree, I’ve got nothing but praise for, I’ve got nothing but praise for Crossroad, but it’s a totally different way of working. Flame Tree I’m absolutely delighted with the amount of support that they give their writers in terms of marketing and promotion, and well just all round, there’s always somebody there if you need them. And of course working with Don D’Auria. Who wouldn’t want to work with him? Crossroad have been great because it’s quite difficult to get your books reprinted when they’ve gone out of print, especially if they are novella length as opposed to novels. There are a couple of novels that they’ve put out for me but the rest are novellas, and it’s notoriously difficult to get a publisher to put those out, even if you say well stick two together and make a novel sized package. “No. They’re reprints. We try not to touch reprints!” But Crossroad are very friendly, very informal, just they’re lovely people to work with and so are Flame Tree. So fabulous, I’ve got nothing but praise for them. What’s next for Catherine Cavendish? I have a novella coming out with a different publisher, Silver Shamrock, and that’s a new one, that’s coming out in June, and that’s a witchy story, set somewhere that isn’t actually said to be Cornwall but it’s very similar to Cornwall, which again is somewhere I know, and that involves long dead witches. Unfortunately the spirit of one of them is let loose accidentally from the place where she’s been confined hundreds of years before, and so you can imagine mayhem then ensues! and from Flame Tree I’ve got a new novel coming out in January/February next year which is called In Darkness Shadows Breathe, and that’s a very different story. Two main characters, they are both in the present, both living parallel lives but their paths cross. One of them is experiencing some major major surgery, so she’s in a hospital for quite a lot of it, a lot of the action takes place in a hospital. And that’s where their paths crossed, where timeslips occur, where they find themselves in places where they really have no business being in, rooms that can’t possibly exist, corridors that can’t possibly exist. And yeah it’s some scary demonic stuff happening. In addition to this surgery that poor Nessa has to go through, she’s got to go through all that as well. At least I only had the surgery. Oh I am cruel to my characters! Thank you Catherine Cavendish for speaking with us! The Garden of Bewitchment by Catherine Cavendish "Cavendish draws from the best conventions of the genre in this eerie gothic novel about a woman’s sanity slowly unraveling within the hallways of a mysterious mansion." – Publishers Weekly Don’t play the game. In 1893, Evelyn and Claire leave their home in a Yorkshire town for life in a rural retreat on their beloved moors. But when a strange toy garden mysteriously appears, a chain of increasingly terrifying events is unleashed. Neighbour Matthew Dixon befriends Evelyn, but seems to have more than one secret to hide. Then the horror really begins. The Garden of Bewitchment is all too real and something is threatening the lives and sanity of the women. Evelyn no longer knows who - or what - to believe. And time is running out. FLAME TREE PRESS is the new fiction imprint of Flame Tree Publishing. Launched in 2018 the list brings together brilliant new authors and the more established; the award winners, and exciting, original voices.   Comments are closed.
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