Transatlantic author Catriona Ward, 41, published two well-received gothic horror novels, both historical, before switching things up and setting her third, The Last House on Needless Street, on the edge of a forest in contemporary America. It became her breakout book, a bestseller described by Stephen King as a “true nerve-shredder”. Now she’s back with Sundial, a lyrical, twisty tale of a toxic mother-daughter bond that begins as suburban domestic noir and soon hurtles into weirder, more terrifying territory in the Mojave desert. Ward spoke via Zoom from her home on Dartmoor, where she ascribed a light switching itself off mid-interview to the quirks of country living – either that or a spectral presence making itself felt.
What was the starting point for Sundial?
The novel is quite Grand Guignol and if you’re going to do that, it really helps to have small hooks of reality to hang it on, otherwise it can just drift into madness. I knew it was going to be about nature and nurture, and I wanted to do something on behaviour modification. Then I discovered that as part of its MK-Ultra project, the CIA had installed electrodes in dogs’ brains, to essentially turn them into remote control dogs. Finding that experiment was this little talismanic moment of, “This is going to work.”
Dog lovers might welcome a trigger warning but its depiction of motherhood is pretty disturbing, too.
I’m not a mother, and for me, an element of the horror came from just imagining how overwhelming the pressure must be to provide a whole upbringing for a tiny living human being. I think there can be a temptation to sentimentalise or sanitise motherhood in popular culture. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t felt that momentary urge to murder a member of their family – it doesn’t mean you’ll do it, but excising those feelings does a disservice to that relationship.
Tell me about the backdrop.
I was lucky enough to go to the Mojave, which is a huge part of the book. I found it so gothic, because it looks like freedom but it’s a trap. There’s something about an endless, open landscape where you can be properly lost, where the land can eat you, which isn’t that available to us in this day and age, and it has a particular effect on our minds and souls when we encounter it.
Does it chafe to be described as a horror writer?
Like most terms applied to books, it’s both really useful and not useful at all, but I love horror. I think it’s one of the most expressive, most empathetic genres you can work in. Everyone feels afraid at some point in their life. Reading is a sustained act of telepathy or empathy, and reading horror is even more profound than that: it’s asking people to share real vulnerabilities of yours and open themselves up to their own. It is like going down a tunnel, and hopefully the writer is leading the way with a torch, taking the reader’s hand.
Why do you think horror still elicits an ambivalence that other genres have shrugged off?
I think it’s because of the difficulty of engaging with it, and having to open yourself up to feelings which society dismisses as being quite childlike. Fear isn’t something we’re particularly interested in dissecting; it’s considered a bit schlocky. But when done right, horror is a transformative experience.
Family is a recurring theme in your work. I have to ask, what went wrong (or right) in your own childhood?
Growing up we moved around every few years, not just from house to house but from continent to continent – so from Washington DC to Kenya to Madagascar. You don’t have a physical place that you call home, so as a family you become each other’s home. There’s a huge intimacy and strength and passion in that, but because I have the mind of a horror writer, what always plays around the edges for me is, “How could this go wrong?”
Describe your most frightening experience.
I suffer from hypnagogic hallucinations. They started when I was about 13, taking the form of a hand in the small of my back as I was falling asleep, shoving me out of bed really hard. I knew there was someone in the room and I knew they didn’t mean me well. With the information I had at the time – pre-Google as well – there was no other explanation for it, was there? I think it’s probably the deepest chasm I have ever looked into. There’s nothing comparable to it in the daylight world.
Is that what led you to horror?
When I first read [WW Jacobs’s short story] The Monkey’s Paw I remember feeling that fear again and thinking, “This is where you put it, this is the house you build to contain the demon.”
What do you think makes horror and the gothic so appealing as vehicles for feminist ideas?
There’s a tricksy sense of empowerment, particularly from the ghost story. I don’t know any woman who hasn’t felt a bit like a ghost in a meeting, so you can see the appeal. And just being a woman has an element of body horror to it. Childbirth? That’s some horror right there.
You started out as an actor. What made you turn to writing instead?
I was just so bad at auditioning, and suddenly realised it wasn’t working. It took seven years to finally find what I wanted to do instead and there was such a sigh of relief when I discovered the page as a place to tell a story. You get to be a kaleidoscope of selves scattered across the page, and I’m more real there than I feel in life sometimes.
You sold film rights to The Last House on Needless Street. Are you a fan of cinematic horror?
I can’t watch horror films, I’m terrified of them. You can write and evoke things, and because it is a collaborative act between reader and writer, the reader almost has an element of consent. Visual images are an entirely different effect.
What books are on your bedside table?
I’m actually not reading very much because I’m writing but Kelly Link’s short story collection Get in Trouble is always by my bedside. Her world is so real that when I come out of it, I feel like this one is unreal.
What was the last really great book you read?
Mrs March by Virginia Feito. I loved that book – I got real writers’ envy. It was marketed as mainstream literary fiction but for me it was such deep horror.
What childhood reading has stuck with you?
I remember Watership Down having a profound effect on me. It’s not about rabbits at all; it’s almost a platonic ideal of society. I also read Stephen King young. He is incredibly powerful for teenagers, because you have all these new feelings that you don’t know how to deal with, so to have someone lay it out and say yes, this is horror is immense.
• Sundial by Catriona Ward is published by Profile Books (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
