Literary Wanderlust announced in their most recent newsletter that my Gothic Romance novel is officially forthcoming. So, I wanted to take a moment to write a little about what inspired this dark and brooding tale.
Like most classic gothic fiction, Ravenswood Hall has a tragic romance at its heart. The ancient pairing of eros & thanatos has always intrigued me, and I set out to explore it with my whole soul in this novel. The result is a danse macabre laced as much with ruin as with growth.
Often, what bled out onto the pages of Ravenswood emerged from my own experiences with death, and with grief. Anne Rice says it more eloquently that I ever could:
“You do have a story inside you; it lies articulate and waiting to be written — behind your silence and your suffering."
When I set out to write the most classically gothic story I could, the story I've always wanted to read, I had no way of knowing how it would utterly change me. I couldn't have known that my protagonist's horrors and healings would seep into me, and would help me understand and accept my own grief.
I still write grief horror, almost instinctively. Somehow the grief became my muse, the entity behind me, urging me on, as my mother would have if she were still here.
As Oscar Wilde puts it, "Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic."
So here I am, trying to pull the magic out of my tragedy, to create something exquisite. Once #RavenswoodHall is born into the world, you all will have to tell me if I've done it.
All my love,
Holly
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