“One was just picking up a volume in a second-hand bookshop of a very strange medieval mystic called Margery Kempe. And then, she says, three came along within a few weeks. Paver knew for a long time that she wanted to write a Gothic story in the Fens ( “the Fens as they used to, not drained fields, the real marshes that used to drown East Anglia” ) but she didn’t have a spark. And then the question for her as her life becomes a battle of wills with her father is ‘is he going mad or is there really something out there in the Fens?’ I don’t think you can get more Gothic than that really!”

She’s got this repressive father and he’s got a long-buried secret which, when he finds this medieval Last Judgement in the graveyard, starts to surface. We spoke about the novel, the unusual elements that inspired it, as well as her love of ghost stories and the Gothic.įor Paver, Wakenhyrst is a “quintessential Gothic novel…where unnatural and irrational elements of the past surface into an isolated and enclosed setting.” It contains many classic Gothic tropes says Paver, “it is set in an isolated manor house in the Fens, there’s an element of the past in that we’re in Edwardian England, my heroine (they are often heroines in Gothic novels) is a girl and she’s just growing up and then there’s an element of ‘well, it could be madness or it could be a true haunting’. I had the pleasure of speaking to Michelle Paver about her latest book, Wakenhyrst, which is very much in the Gothic ghost story tradition, even more overtly Gothic than the previous two she has published.

Amongst her extensive oeuvre is also the bestselling Chronicles of Ancient Darkness series, consisting of six historical fantasy novels for children, to which three more books were recently announced. Readers of Sublime Horror will likely know novelist Michelle Paver best for her acclaimed ghost stories Dark Matter and Thin Air.

Wakenhyrst by michelle paver