Story Notes: About This Horror  

As you now know, this is not a haunted house story. For sure, at the beginning, a family buy an old and decrepit house, and the property even boasts a tragic history. Sinister presences occupy spaces inside the house and even climb through the windows. The building itself works upon the minds and dreams of its inhabitants; this house profoundly affects all who decide to live beneath its roof. So readers might expect to enjoy, or endure, another haunting inside an old house. And yet this story is not a haunting and this house is not haunted. It is cursed.

Horror writers and their readers favour haunted buildings. I’d guess that, even more than zombies, vampires, werewolves and demons, the haunted house, with its ghosts and apparitions, may be the most perennially popular device in the field of horror, from the Gothic onwards. We all love a haunted house story. Long may disembodied voices and footsteps sound in supposedly empty rooms on the pages of stories. As a writer, I’m certainly not done with the setting and its ideas. And yet I’d warrant that one of the greatest horrors of all, for so many, will not be what you actually live, eat and sleep inside, and call home, but what lives next door to you. The neighbours.

So this is a horror story, a folk horror story to boot, about horrible neighbours. It’s very English but I hope its ideas, themes and effects will be felt and appreciated universally.

Neighbours, eh? Easy to overlook them. Too easy to dismiss your new neighbours as an outlier, an insignificance that will have no effect on your lives and play no real part in your pursuit of contentment, comfort, security, protection, shelter, warmth, privacy and solace. We all need our homes to provide these stabilising values in our lives. Not only are these domestic attributes and qualities really important to our mental and physical well-being, and to the happiness of our families, but we probably still consider a decent home to be a human right.

We will also go to great lengths and expense to acquire the right home and to make it ours (to find our current family home, we looked at thirty-two properties in twelve months and bought number thirty-one). So, whether they’re rented, or inherited, or we’re mortgaged up to our plums, our homes are extremely important to us, in so many ways. Sometimes they may be all we have. We’ll probably spend most of our lives inside them; will sleep most of our sleep inside them; will spend much of our income on maintaining and improving and repairing them. Our children will grow up in them, and pets will mark their territories around them; our homes may also bring us close to penury and bankruptcy. We do life in them; we go through life in them. And, in a strange way, a home can become a mother to us when we’re older. Homes protect us.

Home. A word with a single note that signifies safety. From the world outside. From others. From them .

Given all this, whenever we move into a new home, before we even put the key in the door, why do we pay so little attention to the people who live next door? Why do they continue to be an afterthought? And if your property is semi-detached or an apartment, you will have other people, even lots of other people, occupying their own private space mere inches from where you live, sleep and eat.

You will see them. They will see you. You will hear them. They will hear you. Some of the things you do will affect them; some of the things they do will affect you.

As I see it, before moving house, you should consider that who lives next door is as important as how many rooms you’re getting, or the state of the roof and plumbing.

But do estate agents even mention the neighbours to prospective buyers? Do the previous owners and tenants brief you (as they’re fleeing)? Does anyone ever try and warn you about those who live over the hedge and fence, or above and below you in a block?

Do they hell. And so neighbours often get away with terrible behaviour for years. Even murder.

I’m going to get personal now. Not including halls of residence, at the time of writing I’ve lived in twenty flats and houses across fifty-one years. Each of those properties, or homes to me, had neighbours.

One house was burgled twice and the neighbour heard a group of intruders smash a window but never called the police. One neighbour in London wouldn’t let me read my gas or electricity meters, because they were in her porch. I also lived next door to a house with a revolving door in which scores of people came and went and one was murdered as I slept. CID woke me up at 4 a.m. and asked me if I’d heard anything in the night. I said, ‘Are we talking about that side?’ And we exchanged a knowing look. When I left home at 6.30 for work, police tape encircled our little house. A man from forensics, wearing a white suit, was doing a fingertip search on the pavement outside the front gate. I literally stepped over him.

I’ve had neighbours who sat on their roof at night and sang; neighbours whose kids had a hunting bow and shot barbed arrows through the hedge into our garden; a neighbour who, without asking, parked her car on our drive, because she had three and was tired of trying to squeeze them onto her own; neighbours who smashed fences and used a front lawn as a right-of-way. I’ve had a great many neighbours and some of them I would only wish upon my worst enemies. The scene of the chainsaw cutting the tops off the trees is a true story – it actually happened to a friend of my dad’s as well as a friend I now swim with in the sea.

So I have lived very close to the compulsively rude, provocative, unpleasant, entitled, selfish, boastful, anonymous, even murderous: they were all neighbours. I’ve had neighbours on my mind for years, folks.

And yet, as a child in our many family homes and at our many addresses in New Zealand and England, apart from the odd sad divorce, still deeply shocking in the Seventies, my memories of our neighbours are wholly positive. My parents exchanged Christmas cards with some of them for decades after we moved. We had neighbours who looked in on each other’s sick kids, socialised together, fed pets, invited us to barbecues, loaned keys, babysat, assisted each other with DIY and gardening, dropped us off at school when it was wet… One neighbour even gave me my tea after school, when I was four, when my mom was ill and my dad was at work. She was lovely and looked like Cat Woman in the early Batman cartoons. Neighbours regularly welcomed us and became friends (even when my pet chickens destroyed their vegetable plots).

The concept of the ‘good old days’ is a slippery slope, a loaded and often misleading idea, particularly in these days of dangerous populism. But neighbours, generally, used to be better. I’m talking the Seventies, and before that too, I’d guess. That’s what I think. And I’ve said it.

If I am right, then what happened to good neighbours? Neighbours who’d run round with a bucket of water if your house was on fire? Or, the modern equivalent, take in your package from Amazon when you’re out? Where did they and those values go?

I think the breakdown of community and society, especially in the freewheeling, greed and status-obsessed Eighties, did something to the role and duty of being a neighbour. The very nature of the neighbour was transformed, or just ceased to exist. Neighbourliness probably went the way of a good many other things that made life easier and more pleasant. In the Seventies, the societies I lived in were less transient, more equal economically and more egalitarian in outlook; few owned much stuff. The Second World War still wasn’t that far away in the rear-view mirror. Postwar, the Commonwealth countries that I knew weren’t so competitive about status, or fearful of strangers, or resentful about not having enough stuff, or ashamed of a low status conferred upon them in a loaded game in which we are all pitted against each other in a futile challenge of compare and contrast. Though some poor bastards still lived next door to Fred and Rose West, and Christie, so nothing was ever perfect!

International cities may have always been exceptions too, where many homes traditionally tended to be self-contained units, and people more anonymous; where people lived next door to each other and shared the same steps, but never shared a word in years, or ever. Neighbours may even have studiously avoided each other’s eyes. But in the ‘burbs, towns and villages, things were different.

So it is these divisive times that we all now haul ass through, and my age and personal experience, that have contributed to my desire to write a horror novel about neighbours. I am surprised that there aren’t more – I can think of just two. Yet haunted house stories are innumerable. How many of us have lived in a haunted building? Very few. How many of us have had awful neighbours? Nearly all of us, I’ll wager, at one time or another. Unless you’re really fortunate and never move, you will have bad neighbours in your life. The more you move, the more of them you will encounter and experience. And in these times of great division, of the dismantling and hasty rebuilding of the state, and of grotesque inequality and the absence of traditional communities, I’ve decided to use a microscope on two sets of very different people, who hate each other. But share a border and dividing wall.

I’ve shrunk the world and society down to, pretty much, two houses, two gardens, two families and a wood beyond the fence. Simple world; intense relationships. I don’t even want to give the place a name; it is rural, it is British, it is regional (in the South West). The young move into an old house with people of a different generation next door. Class, age, territory, personal habits and priorities, personalities (and their disorders), differences, actions and reactions, even cultures: they are all then poured into the pot and shaken. These were the things that mattered to me aesthetically, when they collided. I then added a touch of magic. And horror.

This novel also marks a change in my approach to the form: it is adapted from my own screenplay (my second) for a feature film. The screenplay has been in development for three years and in that time I have produced five versions of the same story and attended umpteen meetings with directors and producers. One day the screenplay may even get the “trigger” and become a film. Who knows? It won’t be for want of trying. But now I’ve completed this adaptive process back to front – film to book. So, how did this happen? And what was I thinking?

While writing my first two screenplays – or “block horrors” – I was advised by some film pros who know their onions to write films that could be financed for $3 million, in order to increase their attractiveness to backers and sales agents. Films in roughly the same vein as most horror films. But before I’d even finished the first draft of each screenplay, I also knew that these two stories would simply have to become my next two prose novels. If the films are never shot – or never shot as I intended – the stories and characters won’t die. They will, at least, live on in books.

I spent months researching aspects of this story for the screenplay and probably used less than 1 per cent of my research. No matter, that’s how it goes. I then wrote a very detailed treatment for myself – around sixty pages (in an industry of headlines and one-pagers, in which few seem to want to read blocks of text, this lengthy treatment was for my eyes only). This research and treatment process consumed about four months, full-time. I then wrote the screenplay in six weeks because I’d done such thorough prep for it. This disparity between prep and actual screenwriting, I have read, is not uncommon. But did having a fully thought-out story and cast make the novel easier to write?

No.

I had more of an outline for the story and plot and characters and ideas than I’ve ever had before starting any of my other novels (and I’ve always done a great deal of research for each of them). But this novel was just as difficult to write as all of the others.

Cunning Folk – the novel – required seven drafts and fourteen months to reach completion. In that time, I reduced the first draft from 110K words to 90K. So why was adapting a 110-page screenplay into a novel no easier?

Because a screenplay can’t tell you how to write a novel. A screenplay is told visually, in pictures, with a little dialogue; a novel is told within the inner life of its characters and you also need to paint the sets and do hair and makeup for the cast, and FX… A few seconds onscreen may need an entire chapter on the page.

But the novel you’ve just read has barely deviated from the characters and story in my screenplay. It’s an exact representation and adaptation of the film that I imagined while writing the screenplay. I also think, but then I would, that Cunning Folk would make a cracking little horror film. But we’ll see… It’s not down to me. But even if it never becomes a film, the story will live in this novel. Nothing was wasted. Two bites of the same dark cherry.

The other major facet, to my eye, that distinguishes this novel from my others, is that this is also my first comic horror novel. At least, in parts. Much of it isn’t funny at all; the scene with Gracey and the plank is one of the most upsetting things I have ever imagined – what I call ‘a permanent harm to the writer scene’. But there is a tragicomic tone to much of the story. A comic tone that was never planned; it evolved naturally within the screenplay. And then it infected the novel. But if you don’t find this story humorous, no matter at all. Take the horror straight up!

So thank you all for entertaining this novelised-potential-film … and don’t let your neighbours grind you down!

 

 

Manes exite paterni

Adam L. G. Nevill

December 2020, Devon