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A few decades ago, if you said the word “Gothic haunted house novel,” the phrase would very definitely have brought to mind something with a rambling Victorian mansion, tortured heroines, mad women in the attic, sombre men, and wailing ghosts. It probably wouldn’t have brought to mind a little old lady baking scones and conducting haunted house tours in 1990s Australia.
But modern authors are expanding the Gothic genre into something more than it was, and many are choosing to write ghost stories without the ghosts. But if that’s the case, just how do you write a haunted house story? Is it even haunted if there’s no haunting?
To answer this question and many more we have with us Kaaron Warren, author of The Underhistory, a story about a little old lady baking scones and conducting haunted house tours in 1990s Australia.
“Around every corner there is something that you don’t really want to see.”
Kaaron Warren
Authors and texts mentioned in this episode include:
- Cat Sparks (we had Cat on 5 Questions back in 2017!)
- The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole
- The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Kaaron Warren is the author of the novels Slights, Walking the Tree, Mistification, Tide of Stone and The Grief Hole and the short story collections Through Splintered Walls, The Grinding House, and Dead Sea Fruit. Her short stories have won her a Shirley Jackson Award, as well as multiple Australian Shadows Awards, Ditmar Awards and Aurealis Awards. She lives in Canberra, Australia.
