AVC: You also chose to gender-swap the story and make it queer. Tell me about how all of that fits together and those identities intersect for you.
KD: I first saw Hamlet as a teenager in the theater in the West End in London. I saw the world’s tiniest Ben Whishaw play Hamlet. He was truly a gangly little teenager. It was really one of those revelatory moments you have as a teenager sometimes because Hamlet, I think, is a role that actors come to once they feel like they’ve earned it. So you often have a much older Hamlet striding on stage, complaining about their parents and being in university. But this production leaned so into the fact that they had Ben Whishaw as Hamlet. They cast Ophelia and Laertes quite young as well. Ophelia was in a school uniform. Her bedroom was covered in boy band posters.
It was such a moment where you understood the whole of Hamlet differently. That’s a character who is comparatively powerless. He might have the trappings of agency, of coming into adulthood, but doesn’t yet have control over his own life. And he’s very hard done by these people, and his grief is an inconvenience to them. But they’re able to dismiss him as a whiny teenager who’s causing too many problems, because that’s his position in the structure. So there was a real kind of revelation [for me], in terms of thinking about this idea of suffering and pain and how we do or don’t tolerate pain in certain people. Who’s allowed to suffer, who’s allowed to be in pain? Who owns that narrative?
AVC: And so often that’s just code for “women” who aren’t allowed to do anything.
KD: Exactly. That’s the fascinating thing. You’ve got Hamlet’s madness and Ophelia’s madness, and they’re two conflicting ways of [expressing it]. One turns inward, one turns outward. But the adults fundamentally are like: “Could you stop being in pain? Because it makes us feel bad about the horrible things we did. Have you considered just getting over it?”
And that just fills me with a fury, a personal fury. And I think I wanted to flip the genders because there’s so much culturally and socially in mothers and stepmothers—I have a mother, I have a stepmother—and how much we load onto those relationships and the way women are pitted against each other in them. There was just so much in this story if you took it from a female perspective, which gave you so much more access into this larger conversation on madness, particularly.
AVC: This is also almost always female-coded when we talk about it, culturally.
KD: Yes. We talk about madness and agency and pain and when things are classified as sane and insane, and I thought it was so interesting. Because, and I’ve said this in interviews before, about this setting, is that even though they’re monied, wealthy, cultured, Bohemian Victorian Londoners, fundamentally these are a bunch of people with no real agency in their situation, fighting over scraps. They’re all fighting to win the game of patriarchy under which we all lose. So I don’t know. I found it fascinating to start from there and see where it would go.
AVC: I could say that Gothic fiction is having a moment, but it really does seem to be something we come back to as readers and just culturally speaking over and over again. Why do you think that is?
KD: I fell down a rabbit hole doing some reading into the origins of the Gothic, just one of those little Penguin introduction books. (Which I say little, but they’re like 500 pages.) And it went back to the Romans, tracking the idea of the Gothic. Some of it’s tied up in these opposing notions of Roman civilization and then a sort of noble Germanic civilization, that introduced the idea of Parliament, and the Anglo-Saxon of it all. And then it followed that line down to almost at one point the British being two sides of a political divide, the Whigs and the Tories aligning themselves with the Gothics and the Romans, who build their mansions along these neoclassical lines.
But it was talking about the emergence of the Gothic in a literary fashion, and it was looking a little bit at the Reformation. And I think there’s something in there that I’m sure someone has already written many brilliant books on that I simply haven’t come across yet is the idea of England as a haunted house. The Reformation was, in a sense, the destruction of a very long and ancient way of life, that really shakes up their understanding of who they are and how the universe works. And yet you also walk around surrounded by massive ruins. Yes, now the castles are ruined, but at that point, the abbeys become ruins. And so it’s pulling back this kind of cultural need to articulate terrible disruption and suffering, and I think fundamentally means there’s something in the Gothic that will always speak to the human condition. So I don’t think it can have moments, or not have moments, in that way because I think it’s just in the [cultural] fabric, the long impact and legacy of classical works, and architecture, and everything. It’s not just a category in the bookshop. It’s there in the material you are surrounded by every day.
AVC: So now we come to it: Your favorite Gothic stories. I’m a little excited/terrified now that I know you have such a grasp on all this history; I’m afraid you’re going to start off by naming something by, like, Marcus Agrippa.
KD: This really is such a hard question. But as I went, I found that inevitably, basically everything I wrote down was some variety of “Something weird is going on in the house”. I know there are other sorts of Gothic works, but I do always come back to: “So: you’re trapped?” I think an element that’s appealing to people is someone looking you in the face and going, “Yeah, no, sometimes, home is not safe”. I think that’s still somehow culturally very hard to say.
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
So I’ve got to start with Rebecca. I always find it so interesting rereading du Maurier because it’s just such a fun time. Her books are somehow incredibly readable. And Rebecca’s such a fantastic classic of the genre. I always have to remind myself that when I go back to these things, they’re contemporary novels. I find that very interesting to think about, that books like this, which were written coming up on 80, 100 years ago, they aren’t historical or period pieces. But now so often when we talk about them or adapt them, we reflexively set them in a historical period, as though that’s when this kind of story happens. Not that the house next door to mine might be unsafe.
But it’s so fascinating to read because at the same time, on the one hand, you can read it as an insidious woman comes in and causes problems. But on the other hand, you can read it as a vulnerable woman trying to placate shitty men around her to survive. Because he’s violent towards her and things, right? I think it must be one of those novels that was read very differently at different points in time. Du Maurier is brilliant at that kind of subtlety of perspective in that you read through one perspective, but you can see all the other kind of perspectives.
AVC: That’s part of the reason I think we keep adapting it, to be honest: “Who do I want to decide is the villain today?”
KD: More importantly, who do you trust? What do you believe? And then that more fundamental question of how do you ever believe anything? I think that sort of unease and mistrust of the self is very, very interesting.
AVC: And so many of the books that came after it just copied that feeling in a lot of ways.
KD: Everything just wants to be Rebecca. Everything and everybody. We’re all just trying to write Rebecca again; it’s that brilliant.
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
The next one I jotted down is Mexican Gothic. I feel like I’m endlessly looking for exactly this kind of book. I just loved it. And, truly, just as we said, everyone wants to be Rebecca, but nobody is. Yet, [Morena-Garcia] can do it. She absolutely can. She pulls off that kind of shifting trust, what’s going on here, how much can I believe the narrative? And it’s got real subtlety. It requires just such a deft touch to render everything incredibly sinister, untrustworthy, and yet you fully go, “Well, fair enough. I see where the character doesn’t leave.” Everything’s right on the edge of plausibility. It’s so well-done. And obviously she adds so much. Moving the setting to Mexico and bringing in the elements of the colonial experience and all this other stuff is so wonderfully well done. It’s so specific. And then, I mean, creepy mushrooms.
AVC: There really are so many stories with creepy mushrooms.
KD: It just really delivers. Honestly, and this maybe sounds like a wanky thing to say, but I feel like the hardest thing to pull off when you’re writing something in a spooky vein is to actually deliver what you promised. It’s bloody hard! Especially because [in this case] it’s so clearly connected to something else, it’s written in such a narrow genre where if you depart too much from what that original is it [falls apart]. It no longer feels like it’s the thing it’s meant to be. So stunning, brilliant, love, no notes. Fantastic.
We’ve Always Lived In The Castle by Shirley Jackson
KD: It’s really fantastic. I feel like I have one theme in this list, which is that I like it when things are untrustworthy in a house with women doing weird stuff. But she [Merricat Blackwood] is just of the most fantastically sinister protagonists. I won’t say too much. I don’t want to spoil it if you’ve not read it because there are some good twists in it. But it’s definitely one of those where it’s apparent that everything is weird and wrong from the get-go. There’s none of that “Oh no, something is off here, and I can’t put my finger on what.” The main character is so…you are fully inside her head, and it’s not an ordinary or a nice place to be. Yet somehow you still don’t quite know what’s up or what to believe.
There’s also a terrible sense of inevitability because you know something’s so off and you know that it can’t go anywhere, that nothing can be done. It’s such an achievement, really. And I know me, giving Shirley Jackson accolades as though she needs that. But she’s a genius, because I think to really build out a character’s psyche like that, create one that you inhabit so thoroughly, it’s really fucking hard, and the creepiest thing. And here it’s just masterful.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman / The Woman In White by Wilkie Collins
KD: Those were the three that I knew had to go in. But I couldn’t figure out what to pick for the last two. “The Yellow Wallpaper,” obviously, but then I wondered, have I picked too many where it’s just“It’s a lady going crazy in the house”?
AVC: “The Yellow Wallpaper” is so creepy though.
KD: And it’s the kind of story that just looks you directly in the eye and says, yup, this is what we’re about. We’re driving ladies crazy. Then I found myself wanting to consider The Woman In White, even though I know it’s more correctly categorized under sensation fiction rather than Gothic fiction. I think often when we think about Gothic fiction now, we are often reaching for the tropes of sensation fiction—the twists and the melodrama and the big house and the moor and the mystery. Some of that has definitely woven its way into this genre, if only because sensation fiction doesn’t seem to have the sort of continued life that Gothic does. So I think “The Yellow Wallpaper” wins.
Dark Matter by Michelle Paver / Thin Air by Michelle Paver
KD: My final one is a more recent ghost story by Michelle Paver. She was a children’s middle-grade author of the Wolf Boy novels, which were huge here in the U.K. I never read those, but I have read her adult stuff; she wrote a couple of ghost stories, which are some of the only ghost stories that have genuinely frightened me. She wrote Dark Matter and Thin Air, which are two books about very different, but also strangely similar topics.
Dark Matter is set in an Arctic expedition that goes to this very remote outpost where they’re going to do a bunch of measurements and studies, but they have to stay through the dark season where there is no daylight. And that kind of increasingly isolated, all dark all the time setting [lends itself] to ghosts. And then Thin Air is set during a 1930s expedition up… not Mount Everest, but some sort of very similar level of mountain. [Ed. note: It’s Kangchenjunga.] And the group is trapped, and they can’t turn back. Both books have a very similar feel, but they are really fantastic. I also wanted to make sure and acknowledge a recent work of ghost fiction because, to me, ghosts are a very interesting part of Gothic fiction. But basically, all these are either “a woman goes crazy in a house” or “a man goes crazy in a remote and cold environment”. So those are the two ways that you can be Gothic, apparently.
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