Some wee thoughts on why I chose to write a gothic thriller after a track record of psychological suspense. Not that the two are poles apart, but a couple years ago I was eyes-deep in climate change research and, well, I was in deep despair about the way we were all headed. /1

I started to think about despair, and how to represent it in fiction. Despair is more than a single event; it's an abyss. It's an experience or mental state or realm in which time is subverted, things feel verrry Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas /2

and you start to realise that there are things that can't be adequately represented by language. For instance, a billion animals dying in Australian fires. You just can't even begin to capture or express the horror of that. The scale of it. /3

And I thought about gothic fiction, and the more frequently I encountered news reports about extinctions and calving glaciers and famine I thought - the only thing I can write is gothic fiction. /4

The gothic examines the unspeakable attributes of despair, its surreality, or the ways in which despair tips reality upside down. In the realm of despair, the rational and the logical cease to exist; the known world collapses and the unknown is thrust to the forefront /5

of the gothic experience. It’s essentially representing a state in which mortality becomes dizzyingly technicolour; the human subject in the gothic stares into the abyss of her worst nightmares, is brought cheek to jowl w/ the monsters of both her childhood and her adulthood. /6

The ultimate test that the gothic protagonist faces lies not in escaping the monster, but in resisting becoming the monster.

/7

So although #TheNesting is a story borrowing certain tropes of horror and ghostliness, underpinning it is these thoughts of unspeakable tragedy for which there simply is no restitution. The landscape and themes of the story - motherhood, death, climate change, architecture - /8

for me are symbols of the narrative we're all experiencing at the moment, which is intrinsically gothic. The experience of the world at the moment is off-the-charts we-need-new-words-to-speak-about-it surreal. And that's what the book aims to capture.

Thanks for reading. /9