John Harrison has been working in horror for thirty years, as a composer (Creepshow, Tales from the Darkside, Day of the Dead), writer (Tales from the Crypt, Residue, Book of Blood), director (Creepshow, Tales from the Crypt, Tales from the Darkside: The Movie) and producer (Diary of the Dead, Residue). But the multi-hyphenate has another hyphen that some fans may not be aware of: novelist.
In 2013, Harrison published Destiny Gardens, a Stephen King/Amblin-inflected period piece, following a group of kids facing organized crime and societal neglect in the 1950s. And now, ten years later, he’s channeling Shirley Jackson, Daphne du Maurier and Gillian Flynn in Passing Through Veils, a ghost story and psychological thriller with strong gothic romance vibes.
From Wordfire Press:
Kathryn Fields moves into a run-down Georgetown, D.C. townhouse intending to restore it—and at the same time, hopes to rehabilitate her own bruised soul from a recent nervous breakdown that derailed her promising career.
But when Kathryn discovers a forgotten vanity behind a false bedroom wall—and the secrets hidden there—the veil between the real and the surreal is abruptly pierced. And the ghost of a beautiful woman who was murdered in this very townhouse escapes to seek revenge.
Is this simply a fantasy of Kathryn’s damaged psyche?
Or have her own demons finally escaped to torment her?
I received an Advance Reader Copy of Passing Through Veils and tore through it. The book is dark and haunting, sexy and riveting. I had a chance to speak with Harrison last week via Zoom, and the author opened up about his process, inspirations, and the power we give our own ghost stories.
Passing Through Veils is your first novel in ten years. I’m curious what lit the fire under you to write this story?
Well, I’m fond of saying that this is what happens when there’s a pandemic and a guy has too much time on his hands. It’s a story that I’ve been carrying around for quite a while, and like a lot of the stories that I think up, it’s like, ‘Is this a good TV show? Is this a theatrical? What would be the best venue for this?’ Like Destiny Gardens, my previous novel, I started writing notes. The way I write in terms of notes and prep, it becomes a longhand narrative anyway. So at the end of the day, I look at it and I go, ‘Well, I’ve started writing this as prose, I might as well keep going.’
I thought I could get into some things that I can’t really do in a screenplay because of the contracted time and the idea that, in a novel, you can really delve into the internal monologue that a character is having with herself.
In this case, there is a very deep psychological aspect to the whole story. It just felt like a novel would be a much better venue for me to explore that than to try and externalize it all for a film screenplay. So I started writing it and just got on a roll.
I think it’s fair to say that your directing and composing work is more straightforward horror. Would you agree that Passing Through Veils is more of a gothic romance or a psychological thriller? How would you define it?
Yeah, it’s definitely designed as a psychological suspense thriller. There is the horror element of it. But what I love about this material, and this goes to the kinds of horror that I like, as well: do you know whether it’s real or whether it’s something that is being conjured in the protagonist’s imagination? To me, that’s a more fascinating way of approaching a story. I’ve never been much of a gorehound. You might not think so, given the fact that I worked with George Romero for so many years, but his approach to it was always metaphorical, too. So my natural proclivity is to deal with psychological terror, and Passing Through Veils is a perfect example of it.
When we last spoke [for FANGORIA Vol. 2 Issue 18, “Mayhem in Miniature: A History of Dollhouse Horror”], you mentioned that Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is a seminal story in your professional career. I feel like I see some of that influence here. Are there any other books or authors that you can point to as inspiration for Passing Through Veils?
[holding up a copy and chuckling] Well, I just happen to have it sitting here on my desk, Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House. I think Stephen King’s The Shining is another great example. There’s a wonderful small book by a great writer named Jac Jemc called The Grip of It, which is a haunted house story, but it really is another psychological thriller.
But I’m not limited to those kinds of books. My tastes are pretty ecumenical. I have a lot of different things that I like, but Saint Shirley is definitely one of my go-to writers in terms of what’s going on in the mind. The mind is a mansion of many rooms, and a lot of them should remain locked.
Talking a little bit about the psychological aspect of it, Passing Through Veils pretty openly delves into the conversation on mental health. Was that important to you from the beginning, or is that something you found in the writing process?
No, that was something that was there from the beginning. I needed a character who had a psychological fragility to begin with. As I thought about Kathryn and developed her more and how it would happen and why it happened, I came up with, without spoiling it too much, the incident in her past, which became buried and only exploded after she’d been successful suppressing it for years and had a great career. Then, as many of these things do, it’s just one thing that is unexpected, uninvited, and all of a sudden it just triggers something that caused her complete mental collapse. That’s pretty standard. I mean, it’s an interesting, depending on how you do it, trope. You’ve seen it many times before. But what I liked about it was that it gave me an opportunity to move into the house in Georgetown and look at it as a metaphor for her own restoration.
In other words, coming out of this darkness that she was in, finally seeing some light, she needs to rebuild herself. By buying this house, investing the time and the money to restore it to what it once was, is in effect a parallel to her restoring herself. But of course, what happens is she uncovers further difficulties as she begins to tear down walls and open things up. As we all know, when you begin to dig into things and as you’re rebuilding yourself, sometimes you find things that you didn’t expect, and that’s what happens to her.
I think Kathryn’s a fascinating character, because she’s this woman who was very ambitious, very driven and successful in her career, and then she had this incident in her past. She’s now building herself back up, as you say. Speak a little bit more to this character, why you wanted her to be the lead of the story.
It never occurred to me for it to be anything other than her. I never felt the tug of a male character for this. Now, possibly that’s because I am a guy, and so the vulnerability of a woman like this is interesting to me and fascinating to me because it’s an area that I don’t naturally understand, the psychology of what would go into all of that. So that was more interesting for me to explore, investigate, and research. But I also liked that character, that very ambitious and driven woman, who has sublimated a certain part of her life in order to compete in the male world that she finds herself in and is every bit, or used to be, as much of a kickass as the guys that she was working with. She never even thought about it – ‘that’s just the world, I’m going to go in there and I’m going to succeed, so that’s that.’
But what happens when you become that driven and you’re basically ignoring things about yourself that you either refuse to explore or can’t or have forgotten, and then they rear up and you have to deal with them? So all of that became really interesting. I am not one to believe that you cannot write things that you don’t personally understand. In other words, a guy can’t write about a woman, or a white author can’t write about a Black character. I don’t buy any of that because writers live in their imaginations. If you’ve got a fertile imagination, you ought to be able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. What you don’t know, you can find out, you can talk to people, you can research it, and then it becomes a matter of your skill as a writer to convey that.
How did you decide on D.C. as the setting?
D.C. just leaped out as a perfect setting for it because it’s the intersection of so much of our cultural and political world – here in the United States, that is. But just in general, Washington, D.C., is iconographic in terms of what goes on there. When you think of Washington, that’s what you think about. You think about power. You think about the political world that we live in and the cultural world that we live in, and how it influences everything. So it just seemed like it should be set there. In terms of the history of the antagonist in this story and what they did, and then her corporate legal career and so forth, seemed perfect to be set in a place like D.C.
Also in our last conversation, you talked about how people invest inanimate objects with power, and that informs our collective ideas of what a haunting is. I was wondering if you could speak about that idea in terms of Kathryn and her relationship with the townhouse, and with the belongings of the former inhabitant.
Yes, I believe things by themselves don’t have power. We give them power. Talismans, crucifixes, prayer beads, whatever. In and of themselves, they have no intrinsic power. They’re not magical, but they become magical because of what we give them, because of allowing them to affect us. Now, of course, this is a relatively 20th-century or 21st-century idea. If you go back in history, people certainly believed that things had power and magic. So I think again, that gets to the psychological element of the book, which is that, by moving into the house, she’s vulnerable in a way to forces beyond her control. So when she discovers that walled-in closet and the mementos left behind and the mystery of what they are and the dress that she wears, which actually makes her feel like Rebecca, the woman who used to live there, the one that was murdered, we’re giving all of those objects, including the house, the power to influence us.
So when she starts having her hallucinations, are they really happening, or are they projections of her mind as she’s working through all of this? Are they dreams come to life? Along the way, I love it if the readers are saying, ‘Is this real? What’s going on here?’
Between Destiny Gardens and Passing Through Veils, you’ve written two very different books. I’m wondering if you have a third book in you, and what that would look like. Is there a sub-genre that calls to you that you haven’t gotten a chance to work in yet?
Well, it’s interesting you should say that because I actually have a couple of books just sitting on the shelf waiting to be put out there. I’m just about to finish another haunted house story, again getting back to the idea of investing objects with power. It’s called Did You Get the Package? It’s about a young couple that, again, are moving into a home they’ve bought, and suddenly, a package shows up unexpectedly. They don’t know where it came from or who it came from. They start getting these phone calls asking whether they got it, and they don’t know whether they’re robocalls or whatever. One thing leads to the next, and it becomes a very creepy mystery and horror story about what goes on in the house.
The other one I’m working on is a continuation of my Residue world [the 2015 sci-fi horror series written by Harrison and directed by Alex Garcia Lopez]. I did a prequel as a miniseries for Netflix a few years ago, but it emanated from a book that I had written called Paramentals Rising. It’s the story of a city, probably New York, but it could be anywhere where a major catastrophe has disrupted the social fabric. All of a sudden there are, quote-unquote, monsters in the environment. What we eventually begin to realize is that the anxiety created by the circumstance of this catastrophe is actually creating these monsters out of ourselves. So I’ve written the first novel. In fact, if people order Passing Through Veils at the moment, they will get a free short story that I’ve written and a signed copy of the book, which is called “The Noise of the World,” which is actually a prequel of the whole Residue world that I’m building.
There are three books planned. Paramentals Rising is the first. “The Noise of the World” is just a short story that I wrote to introduce the world and what it is. Then there will be a couple more. There are a couple of lead characters that go through the whole thing. The first is about a young woman who comes to the city to find her missing sister, a famous photojournalist. As a result of searching for her, she gets caught up in this larger phenomenon that’s going on across the city.
These all sound so good, and they’re all great titles. I especially love Did You Get the Package? It’s such a perfect encapsulation of the prosaic parts of marriage.
[laughs] Exactly, and then: ‘Well, you must have ordered it.’ ‘No, no, you ordered it.’ ‘Where did it come from?’ Of course, you can imagine what happens to a relationship when they can’t figure this thing out and weird things start to happen.
