‘Write about what you know,’ they tell you when you’re starting out as a writer. Then you write a thriller, or a murder mystery or, in my case, something creepy, dark and twisted, and everyone asks you, with a nervous laugh, if it was based on true events – ‘did you really poison Granny?’ (not a spoiler) – and, even after you’ve explained that you made it all up, they never quite look the same at you at parties.
But there are ways in which authors can write about what they know, even when writing the grimmest and grisliest of plots. My characters, for example, are always drawn, a bit like Frankenstein’s monster, from bits and pieces of people I’ve known, or even celebrities or people I’ve read about in the news: a nervous tic here, a sentence there, a noticeable walk or a particular style of dressing. Emotions, too, are universal and easily transportable into books, no matter what the topic – as are locations.
The House of Whispers is set in a Victorian house somewhere in the commuter belt of north London – I was picturing somewhere around Northwood or Watford – but I didn’t want to name a specific district because I wanted some creative license, for example, protagonist Abi and her husband Rohan are able to see the spread of London’s skyscrapers before them as they leave their favourite Chinese restaurant one evening – and, for that view, I was thinking more Hampstead Heath.
To get a good idea of the house itself, I searched property websites until I had a very real image, inside and out, of the fairly dilapidated, three-storey, red-brick Victorian semi that I had in my mind’s eye. In the novel, it stands at a bend in the road, where its top-floor attic window, along with the matching one on the house next door, look like eyes watching the street, observing all the comings-and-goings of the past century. I very much wanted to give the sense that the house had existed long before the characters I was writing about, and that it would continue to exist long after they’d moved on; that the house was wiser and more knowing than they would ever be.
Abi and Rohan take on their house as a ‘doer-upper’ but Abi secretly understands that you can renovate and refurbish all you like; that you can strip and paint and recarpet and even put in new kitchen cabinets, but it’s all cosmetic. Ultimately, the house is still the house.
I’ve always been fascinated by the history of houses, especially Victorian ones. I lived for a long time in a house which was built in the late 1800s and I always used wonder about the people who’d lived in it before; the generations whose layers of paint lay under our own tasteful neutrals. There was a small room, halfway up the stairs, that I learned would originally have been the maid’s room. What had her life been like, sleeping halfway between the kitchen and the upstairs bedrooms? What sort of emotions did she infuse into the walls of that little room?
I used to like climbing up into the attic where I could touch the original timber beams holding up the roof and think about how the bricks and the cement, the floorboards, the rafters and the roof all made up the same frame that had enclosed the people who’d lived in it over a hundred years ago. In my imagination, the breaths of all those people were woven into the very fabric of the house. As it sheltered families before us, the house would have witnessed love, laughter, anger and tears. Babies would have been born inside it – and people would also have died in its bedrooms. Was that energy still somehow there?
It’s no wonder then, as I started to write The House of Whispers, that the house started to become a character itself. In the second chapter, we see Abi sitting in the kitchen, mentally stripping it back to pre-gone days and imagining the ghost of a girl who used to live there. Abi’s an artist and she’s often able to tune in to the energy of her home: she feels the walls breathing; she feels the house flinch as her husband accidentally bashes his suitcase against it on his way downstairs, and she feels its approval as she cleans and polishes it. But The House of Whispers has its own secrets, and it’s not always on Abi’s side – no matter what we try to hide, there are some truths that simply have to be told.
The House of Whispers by Anna Kent (HarperCollins) Out 5 August 2021
Some secrets aren't meant to be kept... When Grace returns to Abi's life, years after they fell out at university, Abi can't help but feel uneasy. Years ago, Grace's friendship was all-consuming and exhausting. Now happily married, Abi's built a new life for herself and put those days behind her. And yet as Grace slips back into her life with all the lethal charm she had before, Abi finds herself falling back under her spell... Abi's husband, Rohan, can't help but be concerned as his wife's behaviour changes. As their happy home threatens to fall apart, he realises that there's something deeply unnerving about Grace. Just what influence does this woman have over his wife, and why has she come back now?
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