‘It’s rare to really frighten a theatre audience. So it surprised us when people said, “I didn’t sleep for three nights after seeing your show”’
When my first daughter was five, I asked a friend’s daughter, who was a medical student, to look after her in the summer holiday so I might get something written. I had limited time before my daughter went back to school and having that deadline was a very good thing.
I’d always liked ghost stories – MR James and so on – but they were always short. Many are unsatisfactory because they have a buildup, then scramble to an end, and that’s it. I thought there ought to be more than that. But it is hard to sustain tension and fear over a longer book. You can’t just have somebody being terrified every chapter.
I made a list of the essential ingredients, beginning with a ghost. I remember writing down “weather”: I loved reading ghost stories that began in foggy conditions. The setting then had to be isolated, a place where nobody would talk about this thing – a conspiracy of silence.
I always write by hand. The medical student said: “My sister’s doing a typing course and is looking for things to type.” I sent her the first few chapters but she came back saying her sister couldn’t read my handwriting. She suggested a Dictaphone so I bought a cheapo recorder and read into that. Then she came back and said: “My sister says it’s going to be a bit slow because she is too frightened to do it when she is alone in the house.”
