“This is the Story of a Haunting”: Darrin Doyle Talks Horror in “Let Gravity Seize the Dead” https://ift.tt/bx7Z1ok
The great William Faulkner once wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” I kept thinking about these words as I read Darrin Doyle’s latest work of fiction, the haunting Let Gravity Seize the Dead. Doyle’s new book has a particular fascination with the past and how it lingers — and still acts.
With dual timelines, Let Gravity Seize the Dead tells the story of the Randall family, a house, and a common land. With precise language and an intense rush of suspension that doesn’t relent, Let Gravity Seize the Dead is a propulsive and atmospheric horror novel. It’s the kind of book you read in one sitting because it’s impossible to put down.
Darrin Doyle is the author of six other books of fiction, including the novels The Beast in Aisle 34 and The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo. His short stories have appeared in many literary journals. He has worked as a paperboy, janitor, mover, telemarketer, copy consultant, pizza driver, and prep cook, among other jobs. He teaches at Central Michigan University and lives in Mount Pleasant, Michigan.
It was a pleasure to talk to Darrin about the novella form, the natural world, and, of course, horror.
Hey, man. It’s good to be able to talk to you. Before we jump into Let Gravity Seize the Dead, I want to ask about the novella form. You’ve written novels, and you’ve written lots of stories. Did you know going into this project that you were aiming for a novella? Or did it just develop into one?
I went into this with the intention of writing a novella. Many of my favorite books are novellas, such as Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and more recently, Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream and Daniel Kehlmann’s You Should Have Left. I love how the novella feels simultaneously like an experience you live in for a while but also is intensely focused and streamlined like a short story. As a writer, the larger canvas allows me to dig into character, setting, etc. – to luxuriate in this world – while also forcing me to be concise and keep the momentum going.
The writer in me has to ask about how you organized the book. You work in two timelines — one is in 2007, and the other is a hundred years earlier, in 1907. Did you write out both stories and figure out how to intertwine them later? Did you write them back and forth as you went? What was your process?
This is a great question, and the truth is that I wrote like I usually write: with a head full of steam, charging forward without thinking too much about what I was putting down. The opening pages “introduced me” to the 2007 family while also referencing the 1907 family, so I seized on this and began developing characters for each storyline. I also began with the concept of this mysterious “whistle” coming from the woods at night, but I didn’t know what I was going to do with it. A novel that I’ve loved for many years is Kathryn Davis’ Hell, in which she manages three different timelines and sets of characters (which ultimately braid together and intrude upon each other), so I think that model was in my mind as I wrote. I made a choice to not have chapters and to only have section breaks, and this allowed me to leap back and forth in time and POV however I saw fit, in brief snapshots. When more of the book was finished, I began to play around with moving sections to different places to see how this affected things, and I paid closer attention to timeline consistency and things like that. But initially I simply popped in and out of these lives whenever I felt like it. It was a freeing way to write – if I was stuck, I could just jump into a new character.
There are many aspects of this book that I loved, but I especially admired the attention to the natural world. Will you talk about the landscape that inspired the world you created here?
I appreciate you saying that. I worked hard on the nature descriptions and looked to authors I admire to see how they did it (Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast is an amazing example). My specific inspirations were a couple of locations in Michigan: Ludington State Park and Wilderness State Park. There’s a rustic cabin in Wilderness that’s completely isolated, where I could be entirely alone with no distractions and simply absorb the environment. I spent a lot of time in the woods in those places, trying to capture the physical details as well as the spirit and mood.
Extending on that just a bit, I noticed the personification of the natural world: “Now I’m a branch,” “The trees are his teeth… He’ll chew you up. No one will see you again,” and “These woods are like a person. Some days calm and happy, some days hot and mean. Also soggy and sad…” Will you talk about the purpose in giving a sense of human life to the natural world?
I soon understood that nature was not merely a background setting element in this story; it was a character that pretty literally infuses itself with the human characters. I mentioned in the last question that I wanted no chapter breaks; this works as a stylistic illustration of how I view nature – something boundless, interconnected, forever moving, and cycling. You can’t separate people from nature any more than you can separate soil from the trees, wind from leaves, and predators from prey. They’re all linked in the same ecosystem, everything dependent on everything else. When I’m out in the woods, it feels like the world is breathing, like there’s a pulse, a bloodstream beneath the surface, and I’m a part of it. Humankind has tried very hard to craft a world separate from nature, but this story suggests that it isn’t possible; we’re animals, bound by the same laws, patterns, and cycles as the natural world. So, this analogy (or anthropomorphism) of nature as a person runs through the novella, but it’s also important to note that the natural world is not like a person. It’s neither good nor evil. It has no emotions. It runs on a system that’s efficient and without mercy, blind to our suffering: “Nothing wasted, nothing tragic. No sadness nor tears.”
We have to talk about the inability to escape the past because it’s such a huge part of this book. It’s a hell of a theme for a horror novella, right?
At its heart, this is the story of a haunting. As you probably know, hauntings are always the return of the past. Ghosts are the past ushered into the present. However, one thing I was unaware of when writing (and only discovered after the book was finished) is the theory of inherited trauma (also called epigenetics). There are studies that suggest that even distant descendants of trauma victims manifest their ancestors’ trauma in their actual genetic code, even if these descendants have no conscious awareness of the trauma itself. In other words, there may be a hereditary component to trauma, and it can carry across generations in the very fabric of our bodies. When I read this, I was like, “Yes, that’s what I was trying to show!” So it’s a haunting not only in the sense of paranormal events but in the sense of generations speaking through each other. As I write in the novella, “Everything alive out here. Everything forever.”
I kept thinking about how fun these characters had to be to create. I won’t spoil anything, but Tina writes letters to the dead. Bernie is just WILD. I could go on and on. Which one did you enjoy bringing to life the most?
I love Tina (the 13-year-old), who becomes a conduit between the 1907 and 2007 timelines. She’s fanciful and imaginative and sort of a trickster figure. She was definitely inspired by Merricat from Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (another influential novella/short novel). But maybe my favorite character to explore was Betty, the mother in the 1907 timeline. She’s a person who is deeply intuitive and sensitive, and yet, because of the era in which she lives, she can’t articulate her ideas – so she keeps everything inside. She’s carrying the burden of a past traumatic event, the guilt of a mother unable to protect her child. When she and her husband begin building the cabin in the middle of a forest, it’s as if her senses tingle, knowing that this place contains “all of the wind-blown misery.” She’s hard and weathered on the outside, but it’s a way of coping and pushing through life – she loves her family but is unable to show it, which is tragic to me.
Let Gravity Seize the Dead puts you at two horror releases in a row. Is another one on the horizon?
When I finished Gravity, I started to have doubts about getting it published since publishers are often reticent to take [novellas]. So, my plan was to complete three novellas and package them together. I wanted the three novellas to be connected in tone, so that meant two additional novellas with horror elements. Of course, now Gravity is coming out, which is awesome, but I’ve got a draft of a new novella and a very rough (incomplete) draft of another. With any luck, they’ll be out in the world someday – maybe as novellas, maybe as novels – but for now, I’m just enjoying the painful but rewarding process of writing them.
I look forward to reading those future novellas, Darrin. Congratulations on the release of Let Gravity Seize the Dead, and thank you for your time!
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