 Hello Fiona, congratulations on your novel; it's an exciting time for authors in the lead-up to the release of their novel, but it must be exhilarating for you, with this being your debut novel; how are you feeling just now? Thank you! I’m still pinching myself to make sure it’s happening. I feel like I’ve been quite excited about it for a while, but now it’s getting so close to the release date, it’s so great to see other people starting to get excited too. Rebellion books are publishing the book; how did you come to work with such a fine publisher? Way back when I was trying to put together a package to submit to an agent, an editor who worked at Rebellion gave me some great advice on my opening chapter. When it came to submitting the book to publishers, of course we sent it to her, and she passed it on to Michael, my editor, who is a big early modern history nerd. The first time I spoke to him, he told me that his first degree was in early modern history, and his second was in science fiction. After that, I think it was meant to be. What does a publisher like Rebellion bring to the table for a debut novelist like yourself? They’ve been great. Rebellion has several in-house history nerds, it turns out, and I’ve really felt the enthusiasm coming through in the amount of time and resources they’ve put into it. The Dark Between The Trees definitely found its people! For those unaware of the book, how would you sell it to them? Five women led by a historian go into a remote wood in northern England, looking for traces of a group of soldiers who disappeared in it during the English Civil War in the seventeenth century. Only two of the soldiers were ever seen again, and the stories they told about what happened to them make no sense – stories of shifting landscapes, of witches, and of a creeping shadow that seemed to follow them through the trees. But whatever it was that found those soldiers, it still walks the woods… The Dark Between the Trees is a fascinating read that taps into the current love for "folk horror" what drew you to this particular horror genre? I grew up near the woods, so it’s a setting I love to explore – there’s something about that feeling of relative isolation from other people, but also the lack of clear lines of sight you find in other kinds of isolated places. There’s so much scope for uncertainty and shifting ground, which lends itself to a kind of atmosphere you can have a great deal of fun with. I also love the way old folk stories morph and change over the centuries depending on who’s telling them. A lot of folk horror starts with an outsider or a group of outsiders walking into a place where they don’t know the rules. They have to learn as they go, connect the dots as they find them, and be inventive if they want to survive. What a gift that is for a storyteller – you can take that in so many interesting directions. The story is told with a dual narrative structure; what was the actual writing process? Did you write it as we read it, or did you complete one narrative thread before starting the other? I wrote it as you read it, start to finish, with notebook and pen. I’m a big planner, though, so I was already armed with my spreadsheet of who turns up where, and who gets gruesomely murdered when. What was the biggest problem you faced with writing a dual narrative structure? And how did you ensure that both threads seamlessly merged? I think writing it as you read it – alternating between chapters with the historians and with the soldiers – gave each thread space to grow alongside the other one. I did have to go back afterwards and check that each story was coherent on its own, though! But I love reading books where several stories are intertwined and build on each other, so it felt quite intuitive to write it that way. I loved how the historical thread had a cast of characters wholly comprised of male protagonists, and the current thread was composed of female protagonists. Was this a conscious decision from you? In real life, there were a few female soldiers in the British Civil Wars, and many more women who travelled with baggage trains. But I knew from the start that my soldiers were too few in number and too disorganised for a baggage train. I wanted them to be ordinary men to whom the extraordinary happened. As for the women – partly I wanted to highlight the contrast in leadership and negotiation styles, and partly I just really liked the particular characters who walked into my head. Which of the characters do you most relate to? I try to have something to relate to in every single character, and not to play favourites. There are a few characters who people might wonder if they’re authorial inserts – but hand on heart, none of them are! It's hard to talk about the meat of the book without giving too much away, but I loved how the wood was almost as much of a character as the humans in the book, what was the inspiration for how you handled the wood, and the concept of what the wood is? As a teenager I spent quite a lot of time in British woodland – I grew up not far from the New Forest, and I like a good walk. Sometimes when you walk for long enough without talking, you can get into a headspace where you’re really noticing a lot of what’s around you, and you start to feel a sort of affection or affinity for your surroundings. It’s a very particular feeling, and I love it, and part of my starting point for The Dark Between The Trees was trying to explain that headspace to other people too. Setting and atmosphere are so tied up together for me, and one of my favourite things about good horror is that feeling of being extremely present in the middle of a situation. If you believe in the woods, that’s it – you’re in the story now. Good luck. Like a lot of folk horror, you don’t provide complete answers for the fates of some of the characters, and you don’t fully explain everything that happens, were you ever concerned about having ambiguity prevail over the show and tell method of storytelling? I loved this approach. I think you either love or loathe the open-endedness, but for me, there was no other way to do it. The thing about a lot of stories from history – and especially from the British Civil Wars, which is a period that interests me a lot – is that they are incomplete. You don’t get all the information, and you won’t get it, because that’s life, and that’s record-keeping. Often we’ll never be able to know exactly what happened in a situation on a particular day in a particular place. And often, the way historians understand an event – and people’s motivations and such – has changed significantly over time. There’s one really interesting story about the civil wars that I first heard in Diane Purkiss’s The English Civil War: A People’s History. We know that a lot of roving groups of soldiers at this time would go into villages and steal everything. They’d steal stuff they didn’t need. They’d steal completely stupid stuff like furniture they could barely carry. And then, towards the end of the 1940s – three centuries later! – scientists working on the effects of starvation at the end of World War II discovered that prolonged starvation causes people to become hoarders. As in, it physically does something to their brains. It’s a whole different spin on it, right? Suddenly this is not the Terrible Roundheads Raging Through The Country Stealing Everything Out Of Spite. Suddenly it’s desperately hungry men who don’t know where their next meal is coming from, or the one after that, and it’s literally changed their brain chemistry. But before the 1940s, nobody knew about that, so their theories about what was happening were different. We’re all of us, always, working with incomplete information, and trying to make the best sense of it that we can. That’s the predicament of every historian. Every single one of my characters is doing it, and every reader too. The level of open-endedness is a massive gamble on my part: with my storytelling hat on, I know that finding out “the answer” at the end can be satisfying, and not doing so can be frustrating. But as a frequent history-enjoyer, this is the balance that rang true to me. Woods and forests have always had a massive role in the psyche of the British people; why do you think that even in this technological age, we are still afraid of going deep into the woods? I wonder if, for a lot of us who live in built-up areas, it taps into that feeling right in the middle of folk horror – of being away from your home territory, of being an outsider who doesn’t know the rules. If you needed help, could you call for it, and how long would it take to arrive? Are the woods in your book based on any natural woods, and have you had any experiences in the woods that you'd rather not have had? Mate, I once got lost while orienteering with a group of half a dozen teenage girls, six weeks after several of us had seen The Blair Witch Project. I’m not saying it had a lasting impact on me, but… Your description and use of the Corrigal was magnificent, mainly how you kept it unseen, more of a presence than a full-on in-your-face monster, was this always your intention? Oh yes. We’re back to that thing about having no clear lines of sight in the woods – it’s so easy to watch people without being seen, far easier than it would be halfway up a hill or something. I did wonder early on whether it might be fun to leave it open whether the Corrigal really existed at all – but there’s quite enough uncertainty in this book, and sometimes we all deserve a nightmare-haunting monster, as a special treat. The dynamics of the relationships between the researchers was another highlight of the novel. Would you have kept the same dynamics if you had introduced a male character to the team? I wonder. Dr Alice Christopher, my lead researcher character, has notably had some frustrating experiences with male academics which affect her decisions at several points. With the greatest respect to male academics, I suspect if any of them had asked to come on Alice’s trip, she might have tried to eat them alive on principle. For those who are thinking about reading the novel, what other books or films would you recommend they read to get a feel for The Dark Between the Trees? Speaking as an abject coward when it comes to cinema, I can never watch The Descent or I’ll die, but The Witch, The Blair Witch Project, and Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England all have that slow-burn dread to them and a great attitude to poking local legends with a stick. As for books, a couple of less obvious ones that definitely influenced me are Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay (in which a group of schoolgirls go missing off a mountainside in the Australian bush in 1900), The Owl Killers by Karen Maitland (where fourteenth-century lay nuns in East Anglia find themselves pitted against the local village’s ancient owl gods), and Witch Wood by John Buchan (he’s much better known for The Thirty-Nine Steps, but this one is set during the British Civil Wars, as a newly minted local vicar in the Scottish Borders discovers his parishioners still secretly perform pagan rituals in the woods after church). As mentioned earlier, folk horror is experiencing a golden period, but what do you think is the most significant mistake authors make when writing in this field? I think one of the biggest strengths of folk horror is often the strangeness (from an outsider’s perspective) of insular communities or traditions, which translates for that outsider into unpredictability. If you choose to explain it in too much depth – or if it’s too obviously a metaphor for something else – then it can lose some of its impact. That being said, folk horror is definitely having a golden period, isn’t it? I’m so delighted, I feel like my to-read list has exploded lately. What a brilliant moment it is to be in the middle of this wonderful, niche little subgenre. And what is, in your opinion, the greatest piece of folk horror ever produced? I’ve been wracking my brains about this, but in my heart I know there’s an easy answer. It’s the Edward Woodward Wicker Man, isn’t it? The Wicker Man is just a pitch-perfect bit of horror. By the way, as an seventeenth-century history nerd it pains me deeply to have to say that Witchfinder General is pants, but I’m afraid it is. As for books, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner is a technical marvel which still gives me shivers. You are marking the book launch with an Edinburgh event on 13th October. Do you have the details of how people can attend this event? That is happening! I wrote some of the first draft of The Dark Between The Trees in the café of Waterstones on Princes Street in Edinburgh, so I have a lot of warm fuzzy feelings about celebrating its launch there. I’m sharpening my best 1640s superstition-related anecdotes (ask me anything about Prince Rupert’s poodle who was accused of witchcraft); if you would like in on this, please do come along to Edinburgh West End Waterstones, at 6pm on Thursday 13th October. You can get tickets here: https://www.waterstones.com/events/an-evening-with-fiona-barnett/edinburgh-west-end. And a bio because you asked for it: Fiona Barnett Fiona Barnett lives in Edinburgh, but grew up by the New Forest with stories of Roundheads and Cavaliers, and ancient secrets in the heart of the woods. She has podcasted on the British Civil Wars, and her short fiction has appeared in Haunted Voices: An Anthology of Scottish Gothic Storytelling. The Dark Between The Trees |
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