SPINE-TINGLING PAGE-TURNERS
Ten great reads that will give you the chills.
MUM-OF-TWO Helen Grant makes a living scaring the bejesus out of her readers. Her latest offering is no exception. The Perthshire-based award-winning author admits she was reduced to tears while writing it and can scare herself as she cranks up the terror in the worlds she creates.
But it’s all too much for her tough Tayside Mountain Rescue volunteer husband Gordon, 59, whom she confesses “struggles” to read her work because he can’t stand the suspense.
Helen, 53, mum to Iona, 19, and William, 17, reveals: “He abandoned Urban Legends – the book before Ghost – because it got too scary for him, which is strange because he actually goes out in the dark and the howling wind to look for dead bodies, so you’d think that he would have been OK with it.”
Ghost is set in Langlands House, a crumbling mansion on a remote Scottish estate inhabited by only young Augusta McAndrew and her elderly grandmother Rose. Locals think it is haunted. According to the prologue it is, but chillingly the reader is told: “not by the ghost you think.”
Pulsating with mystery and charged with psychological tension, it is a highly addictive read.
Two-and-a-half years in the making, Helen admits it is her most challenging novel yet, despite having notched-up awards for her short fiction The Beach House, which won the Jimmy Perez Trophy 2015 at the Shetland Noir book festival and her first novel The Vanishing of Katharina Linden, which took an American Library Association Alex Award in 2010 – the same year she was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal.
Helen, who with her family has lived in Barcelona, Germany and Belgium, set part of Urban Legends in Brussels’ sewers and admits she was “hyperventilating” as a serial killer pursued its main characters.
But the inspiration for Ghost is entirely home-spun. Written on the dining room table of her Crieff home, she says it was borne out of the lost and abandoned grand houses of Perthshire – once the subject of an exhibition at Perth Museum and Art Gallery – and her local Innerpeffray Library, the oldest free lending library in the country.
She explains: “Typically these grand homes were places which were built in the early 1800s and became a bit of a white elephant because they were too expensive to heat and maintain.
“A lot of them were demolished. But some of them are still standing there, just mouldering away.
“I was thinking what if one was supposed to be knocked down but hadn’t been, and it was still standing there with all the contents in it, in the middle of a forest. Who would be living there and why would they be hiding away like that?”
So Langlands House and its inhabitants were born, with its library playing a key part of the novel.
Helen – who started writing in her mid-30s when her children were young – reveals she comes up with her best ideas when she’s in the bath.
She chuckles. “It’s the only half hour of the day when I get complete peace and quiet and I’m not trying to do anything else, I’m just sitting there and relaxing. I get a lot of my ideas in the bath.”
Time to think is paramount. She explains: “The characters seem really realistic to me. I have a very clear vision of what is happening, like a film playing out.
“If I think about Langlands House and I wanted to zoom in on something I could see it really clearly like the grain of the floorboards and the scratches on the glass eyes of the Stag on the wall.”
And she admits: “I suppose I do scare myself. There were bits in Ghost that were really harrowing and I cried while I was writing it – I felt awful for having written it.
“People might say ‘why do you write these things if they upset you?’ But as far as I am concerned it’s the story. It’s what happens even if it’s a bit traumatic.”
She adds: “Some people love this type of stuff, some people hate it. We’re quite divided in my family, my daughter and I love to watch scary films but my husband comes in and says ‘what are you watching this stuff for? It’s too horrible – why do you like it?’ He doesn’t get it at all.
I think it’s because there are things we are all afraid of – dying, getting old, losing the people that we love.
“Some people cope with that by looking away from it and not thinking about it and other people like to examine it.
“And that is why I am interested in writing this kind of thing. I write about the fear of something happening or the fear of something happening to someone you love or feeling responsible for something that has happened.”