SARAH LOTZ

Underground, overground… The acclaimed dark fantasist is back once more.

There’s a reason Sarah Lotz’s new novel, The White Road, deals with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). While living in South Africa, Lotz endured a “horrible home invasion”. This didn’t just happen once. “The gang that attacked us came back and they kept coming back,” she says. “Eventually you go for a month without any sleep.” Lotz had already endured difficult experiences, including time spent on the streets as a teenager in Paris. She was about to learn that PTSD, an anxiety disorder, can creep up on you. “It can be cumulative,” she says. “This experience basically kicked it off. My husband, who was there at the time, and my daughter, didn’t have it. I was like, ‘This is bullshit, I’m just going to get over this thing.’”

It wasn’t that easy. Lotz tried talking therapy (“I couldn’t stand it”), anti-anxiety medication and moving to “the border of Wales and Shropshire where there’s nothing but sheep”. Now there’s The White Road, a novel that divides its narrative between South Wales and Mount Everest.

If the book’s cover brings forth images of noble adventurers overcoming trauma, that’s not really Lotz’s style. One of the book’s two narrators, Simon Newman, is a man whose idea for a clickbait-driven website revolves around filming “people who have died in horrific accidents”. Newman goes underground in Wales, in search of three drowned bodies that have never been recovered.

“I was interested in writing a character who’s not necessarily immediately likeable, who always has a bit of an edge,” says Lotz. “It’s a real challenge because you’ve got to drag your reader along with you, so can you make someone who does some pretty nasty things? Can you get them onside with your character? It’s that whole thing about perspective: you kind of do go along with whoever is telling the story, like [Patricia Highsmith’s Tom] Ripley.”

DIGGING DOWN

To do her research, Lotz signed up for a subterranean adventure with a “bloody amazing” team from Dudley Caving Club. She expected to get claustrophobic. She didn’t. However, she did find negotiating 20ft climbs while wearing wellies and carrying caving gear alarming. On reflection, she says, she shouldn’t have asked for help to test the proposition that “if you go down in a cave for a long enough time” the purity of the underground air means you can truly smell the air above ground.

“At some point they were carrying me bodily and they filmed it,” she says, “and there’s a clip of me somewhere on the internet basically screaming and just going, ‘Get me the fuck out of here!’” Still, at least she learnt first-hand that, yes, you can smell the air up on the surface.

Researching the other story strand, set in the high Himalayas in the 1980s, involved a rather more enjoyable trip, as Lotz and her husband trekked to one of the Everest basecamps. While she’s not a mountaineer herself, she’s “addicted” to non-fiction books on mountaineering and this too plays into The White Road, especially the notion of the Third Man, the feeling climbers sometimes have that they’re being accompanied by an unseen presence.

In the novel, this is an eerie sense of being followed, which again relates to PTSD. “There was a shadow in my peripheral vision, which sounds completely insane but that was one of the symptoms,” says Lotz. “I was constantly jumping and going, ‘What the hell?!’”

TEEN HEROINE

Despite what she’s been through, it isn’t immediately obvious that Lotz has suffered deeply. Just the opposite in fact. She laughs a lot, and often in a self-deprecating way. She’s tough too, a survivor – her debut novel Pompidou

Posse is influenced by her time living on the streets in Paris, after she ran away from her home in the UK.

“I ran away to France to avoid being arrested, and ran out of money there and ended up living rough for a year in Paris,” she says. “I didn’t tell my folks where I was, I didn’t tell anyone, they all thought I was dead.”

Later, she went to Israel, and was there at the time of the first Gulf War in 1991. With Scuds falling on the country and tensions high, the British government wanted to bring its people home. Ever the contrarian, Lotz headed to South Africa instead with her daughter’s father. She stayed for more than 20 years, and she still misses it.

In South Africa, she got a short story published in a horror magazine. Between 2006 and 2009, she worked on the animated series URBO: The Adventures Of Pax Afrika, where one of her co-writers was Lauren Beukes. As a novelist, The Three (2014), her tale of eldritch plane crash survivors, was a huge breakthrough.

Which brings us back to the present and the quiet contentments of a writer’s life. “I live like a hermit. I see anyone hardly at all. I walk the dogs [and] occasionally go up to London to do work,” she says. What about Sherlock Holmes’ idea that “the smiling and beautiful countryside” is far more dangerous than London’s dark streets? “Actually, weirdly, there’s a murder house down our road…”