Welcome back to Scare Me! a weekly horror newsletter. Today, we’re speaking with multi-award-winning author Catriona Ward, whose latest novel NOWHERE BURNING will be released in the US on February 24.

To read a Catriona Ward novel is to enter a labyrinth of words.

All around us, towering drifts of story disorient our sense of time and place. But Ward is ahead, unspooling a fragile filament for us to follow. As a guide, she’s quick-footed and invisible, always two steps ahead. But she is there, and she does know where we’re going, and she will guide us through.

Her latest novel, Nowhere Burning, is another little marvel in an astonishing string of books—joining award-winning titles including The Last House on Needless Street, Little Eve, Sundial, and Looking Glass Sound. It follows the story of Riley and Oliver, two siblings sent to live with a relative after their mother dies. But their cousin is cruel; he punishes them with taunting threats, withholds food, and neglects their wellbeing. If nothing changes, Riley realizes, her younger brother is going to die.

As she searches for an escape, Riley has a chance encounter that changes the trajectory of their lives. Hidden in the Colorado mountains, there’s a burned out shell of a ranch called Nowhere with a bleak and murderous history. There, runaway children have formed their own commune on the fringe of society. The Nowhere Children, as they’re nicknamed, have earned an almost mythic quality.

And for Riley and Oliver, Nowhere may be the only chance of survival.

Like all of Ward’s books, Nowhere Burning is a layered, multi-timeline story that doesn’t give up its secrets easily. I devoured it over the course of a few days, and I want to preserve its mysteries for you—so there are no spoilers in this interview.

Instead, I tried to glean a glimpse into Ward’s wonderfully creative mind. We talked about nature, craft, inspiration, and being blindsided by sexual innuendos in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. Enjoy!

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Michelle Delgado: Hi there! Where are you today? Are you in the UK at the moment?

Catriona Ward: I'm in London, yes, spending a bit of time with my lovely father, which is very nice. I was in LA two days ago. I miss it like a dead friend. I love it so much. It's a strange city, isn't it? You've got all the different levels of it—you can have show biz LA, you can have nature LA, friend LA. It's an interesting city.  

There's something about flying in and seeing it stretched to every corner of the horizon. I remember being so overwhelmed the first time I saw it, because it just goes on and on.  

It's not really a city, is it? It's more like seventeen interconnected neighborhoods, which is kind of wonderful. I love how the outside comes inside all the time. I've got coyotes on my street. I've got a skunk in my garden—I love her, I respect her, but I don't go near her. No one tells you how beautiful skunks are.  

Oh, I love them. I have a tuxedo cat, and I think he looks like a little skunk. We also had a weasel in our garden this year, which I'd never seen before.  

How big was it?

It was probably like…that?   

That's a proper weasel. There's this tiny, tiny weasel—it's about the size of your palm. It's called the least weasel, which I like to think is because it's the least amount of weasel, while actually still being a weasel. They're so pretty. 

They are! Especially in the way they move. They just bound through the grass.

I'm so glad we had this talk. I love that. There's a meeting point for coyotes opposite my house, and I've actually got a very long recording of them all during the fires. Meeting under the lamppost, baying. There's about 30 of them. And I thought, “Oh, I should go down and sit!” And I was like…actually, no, don't do that.

They still meet there quite a lot of the time. And there's always one who's really late and I'm like, “No, mate, you missed it. They left without you.”

They sound so strange when you get a group of them together. When I went to pick pumpkins with my friend last fall, and there was a thicket, and we could hear a pack having a conversation. The way they laugh and cackle at each other is so human but inhuman, and chilling and beautiful.

That's right. I'm never gonna know what it's like to encounter a pack of wild wolves, because we've kind of eradicated them from our habitats. But it is a kind of calling back, isn't it, to older times?

I also love dismantling of some of the truisms that people have talked about with pack dynamics, this idea of an alpha. Actually, what they found is there's no dominant alpha. They're actually just family groups. Who could not slightly get moved by that?

I've read three of your books so far: The Last House on Needless Street, Looking Glass Sound, and now Nowhere Burning. I notice that you return to characters’ experiences in childhood and adolescence in each book, in different ways. Is there something about that stage of life that intrigues you?

That's interesting, because I hadn't thought about it exactly like that until you articulated it. But I think there's always something so compelling about who we are and who we've been.

I was born in DC, and then we moved when I was three to Kenya. I lived there for four years, and we moved to Madagascar. We lived there for five years, and then we went back to DC, and then we moved to Yemen for five years, and then to Morocco. In between that, I spent a couple of years at boarding school.

So I've got this sense of a past that's really compartmentalized. It was before there was internet, for instance. When I was a kid in Kenya or Madagascar, there's no way you can take a friend across across the globe and still maintain that friendship. You have this sense that you are just there temporarily, and it does give you a strange sense of your present, and later, of your past.

I remember when I read Watership Down, I had this almost physical reaction of longing, because there was this sense of home about it, this sense of permanence and deepness. The Lord of the Rings does that actually—I think Tolkien is really underrated for his nature writing. It's this beautiful kind of elevation of the English landscape. All of these things really called to me, as did and as do things like The Call of the Wild and The Last of the Mohicans, which I read far too young.

These books that center the land and and nature, they became so important to me because there was an anchoring in that, if this makes sense, that I didn't necessarily experience growing up. Maybe I'm the one with the longing for home. I'm sure that's right, and I'm sure that makes its way into the book.

I grew up in one place, but I was adopted, so I always had the sense that I had other kin out there. I hadn't thought about this in a long time, until you mentioned the land, but I used to look up at the moon and think that wherever they are, my biological family could see the same moon. There was something so cold and alien about space, but also comforting and— 

Eternal. 

Yes, exactly. The moon was always important to me in that way.  

I remember the first time I really thought about the moon, I found myself so terrified. It throws everything you are into perspective, doesn't it? 

It does. Space terrifies me more than almost anything.  

Have you ever made contact with your moon family? 

Yes, I did. My mom and I were very close for a number of years, though she's passed now. I identify with what you're saying about having a compartmentalized experience. It's almost metafictional—you've got multiple stories that you're holding at once, and you are the constant through them.

Maybe that's why the way you build these puzzle boxes and beautiful reveals feels less disorienting to me than, possibly, to other readers. 

I think that's really astute. I like the word “reveal” rather than the word “twist,” because I think “twist” implies something you're doing to someone else. Whereas the word “reveal”—to be completely honest, it always feels very naturalistic to me, the feeling of the wool being pulled out suddenly from over your eyes, or the carpet being yanked from under your feet. I don't know why all these metaphors are about fabric, but they seem to be.

I find this to be an incredibly, amazingly realistic impression of real life. I never have found the reveal to be a manufactured device. I've always found it incredibly, incredibly realistic. I don't know if I've ever gone through a day where it didn't feel like I suddenly went, “The fuck is happening?” So for me, these reveals seem natural.

I do think there are rules about fair dealing with the reader, which you have to observe. I don't think you can suddenly announce new information or rules at the end. It should feel like the only natural conclusion that you could possibly arrive at, and yet you would never have known it before. Which, as you can imagine, is incredibly easy to achieve and no big deal. 

You do present all of the information—you're open about it. I just don't know what I’m looking at until the story is complete.  

Exactly. And also, the thing is, people always go, “I guessed it before the end!” Thing is, really, I don't mind if people guess it before the end. It's not the destination. It is the journey. I'm not here to suddenly go "ta-da!" like a magician and unveil this clever plot mechanism. What I'm here to do is tell a story.

Look, an amazing plot twist is incredible. But there seems to be a bit of a need for it, in some cases. And what I'm trying to say is, I don't subscribe to that culture at all. I don't mind if you guess what's happening at the end. In fact, I welcome it! I'm asking you to come with me on this journey. The whole point of the story is not the reveal. The whole point of the story is the story.  

In the traditional bildungsroman, you've got a story that unrolls linearly, and the character is having realizations along the way. But in my experience, you just survive childhood—and it's only later, with time elapsing, that you're able to look back and think, “that's what those adults were doing at the time.” Like you said, it feels very realistic to me.

It's not a manufactured twist, because that implies that the character has been knowingly concealing something from you. In Nowhere Burning, we're having realizations as they are. Riley and Oliver’s memories are imperfect, or their brains are hiding something from them, because they've been through trauma. It's only later, as we're able to watch them process and gain new information, that they're able to see things clearly. I really love that about your work.  

Do you remember that Henry James story, "What Maisie Knew"? It's very simple, but it's [like that]. There are lots of types of reveal, right? There's ones where the character is concealing information, there's ones where the author is concealing information, and then, there are ones where the character is still unaware of the reveal when it happens. “What Maisie Knew” is a good example of that.

It's narrated by a small child, a bit like Josh Malerman's Incidents Around the House. Maisie sees this pair of grown up's shoes outside a bedroom where they shouldn't be. The reader knows what that means, but Maisie does not. And the whole story is about a reveal that the reader gets, but Maisie doesn't.

I think that's really interesting—an unknowing narrator. What do you think about We Have Always Lived in the Castle? I think there's a certain element of Merricat being an unknowing narrator. 

Yes, I was thinking about that book, too. And Hill House with with Eleanor, where there's that horrifying reveal about her mother calling for help. And you're not quite sure if she was awake or not. She knows and she doesn't know at the same time, and you don't know and know at the same time.   

I gave a lecture at Oxford recently on Hill House, and I was obviously incredibly keen to get it right, so I prepped by giving my talk to a group of eighteen-year-olds. It was at Keats's house in Hampstead—they do seminars on English literature, for kids from surrounding schools.

Anyway, it was set out like a gladiatorial arena, so they were in a circle around me, and I was standing in the middle. I was reading that scene from Hill House where the mother is knocking. And—read it again for yourself. I hadn't realized quite what some of it implies. It's: “I'm coming, Mother, I'm coming. I'm coming, I'm coming.” And she's in the room with Theo, and it's just…[the students] were very cute. They didn't embarrass me.

Shirley Jackson! She snuck it right in!  

She smuggled it in! And therefore, I had to do a deep dive on the etymology of the word “coming,” obviously. Which is very, very old. I think it's 1617, in a compiled group of folk songs amassed by a bishop of the Catholic Church.  

I had never made that connection before my talk, [which] was on the physicality of reading horror. So actually, it really helped me, but I sort of wish I hadn't done it in front of twenty-eight teenagers. 

Then again, that's kind of the perfect setting.  

They told me something that I needed to know.

There’s something I heard growing up in the ‘90s: “Kids are so resilient, they can make it through anything.” In my experience, I was resilient—but I had to pay for that eventually. The debt accrued, and it had to be repaid. 

What they mean by resilience is repression.  

Completely. We're in the midst of this cultural moment that I think is so interesting, where there’s a lot of discussion around people cutting off contact with abusive older family members.

There are people who don't get it, who say, “That's your family. They're old. Take care of them.” And there are other people who say, “You don't owe it to anyone to be abused indefinitely.”

Something I’ve really appreciated about your books is that there's never a moment when a child’s experiences are belittled, or made to seem smaller or less impactful than they are. The Nowhere Children are certainly attuned to what goes on behind closed doors in their community, and they seek their own kind of justice. I wanted to ask you about how you approach writing about these dynamics.

That's a really lovely window into it, actually. Thank you. It's really nice lens on it. [Nowhere Burning] is a retelling of Peter Pan. I never found Peter Pan to be a children's book at all. It's brutal. Have you read it recently? There's no reason why you should have done.  

I haven't, and I would really like to. I'm realizing there's quite a lot there that I didn't catch. 

There's an entire page where, when Wendy is born, they discuss whether they can afford to keep her, very coldly. It's a really brutal book. I would not give it to my children to read.

I think Peter Pan is knowingly using that brutality—it's much closer to Lord of the Flies than we think. In adaptations, it tends to be a bit sanitized and a bit cute. It is not at all. It is about mortality, brutality, violence, and survival.

And I thought I'd really like to talk about that. I think the scene you're talking about—no spoilers—it's almost like a mirror image of Peter taking the Darlings out of that window. But it's a sort of vengeful one. I find the whole subject matter so complex and endlessly interesting.

I first got the idea for this when I was driving with my family, and my brother-in-law just pointed at this dirt road, and was like, “Oh, and that's Neverland.” I was like, oh? Because that's not a place, is it? Neverland is not a place. It's an idea. It seemed so improbable, that up that dirt track, that's where it was.

I just suddenly thought, “What the fuck goes on there now?”

Let me be clear, not for just legal reasons, but also for legal reasons, that Nowhere is not Neverland. 

They felt very distinct.  

Exactly. Completely different. No similarities there, officer!

What I found interesting was: If a place holds such damage in its heart—a physical place holds such danger and blood and history—and yet these kids find salvation in it, there's this kind of interesting counterpoint. How much does the place start to influence them in its turn?

TW: The commentary on this video is incredibly eerie and strange, given the disturbing allegations against Jackson by multiple adults who were once children entrusted to his care.

I think it speaks to how difficult it is to extract yourself from cycles of generational abuse or violence. You can do harm reduction, you can make strides. And yet, there's never a bow on it. Sometimes, the healing you're drawn to has its own destructive elements.  

I saw this documentary—I can't remember which cult it was, but a cult survivor said, “When I watch these documentaries, I wish we'd had the second episode where everything's great and suddenly everyone's banging tambourines and having a nice time.” And he was like, “We didn't do that. We went straight from nought to sixty.”

There's a reason why cults work. They provide the lost and the broken with hope. I thought that was very funny, and a very clever thing for him to say. He got out, but in a way, I wish he'd had his second episode.  

Completely! Without spoiling anything, I thought you chose a very interesting and unusual moment in that sort of timeline when writing about the Nowhere Children. I don't think I've experienced that in other stories.  

Oh, thank you. That's very nice. I'm glad I managed to do something remotely original. One thing I find very good and reassuring about all my books, as I've discovered whenever I look at Goodreads or Twitter, is that everybody hates something different. It's very reassuring.  

How has the reception been to Nowhere Burning? 

I watch the Goodreads ranking tumbling. I mean, I suppose it's better than everyone hating the same thing, because then you've done something wrong.

Look, I'd rather write what I write and and speak the truth as I see it, than to please everyone. One thing I do find is that the clearer I think I 'm being, apparently I'm just not. Every time I'm like, “Oh, this one's very straightforward.” Apparently not! 

[Editor’s Note: Nowhere Burning currently has an impressive 3.96 out of 5 stars on Goodreads, with around 75% of reviews falling in the four- and five-star range.]

The girls who get it, get it, as my friend and I like to say! I think when you're being a little more bold or experimental or, like you said, not following the formula of a thriller, I do feel like it resonates more deeply with the people who do get it.

I also sometimes wonder about the marketing of books, and whether that creates the expectation that you’re going to follow certain genre conventions. Not to talk badly on genre conventions, because I love genre conventions! But I don't think that's quite what you're focused on. 

I think there's lots of things at work here. The horror audience is incredibly educated and incredibly literate in their genre. They read in a very kind of advised way. So if you're playing on tropes, they understand that completely.

I also think there's this kind of hierarchy of genre, isn't there? Literature happens from the neck up, right? And then there's everything else. We slightly look down, as a society, [on stories that] provoke a spontaneous physical reaction, which is horror, comedy, and erotica. I think there's a commonality between all these things, which is that they work with your body.

There's a fear and a safety that people feel about being that involved—because opening the door, as a reader, to this emotional experience is really scary, right? And I think that fear accounts for a lot of the slight pushing away of horror as as a legitimate genre, or comedy or erotica. That's the reason why people slightly just go, "Shoo, shoo!"   

Absolutely. That can be very frightening and confronting for people—and also, I think, a very safe container for people who have experienced trauma or who identify with the horror in some way. 

It's cathartic for some, and frightening for others. That's the power of it, and that's exactly why it can be so intimidating for those who wish writing to happen from [the neck up]. 

Your books are, in some ways, a conversation with the reader—but they're also yours. Do you feel a porousness or any difficulty maintaining the boundary between critical feedback, marketing, and your art? Or do you feel able to protect that space for yourself?

Luckily, all the response comes after you've actually finished it, so that's good. During the process, you’re on your own in the dark, chipping away at the cliff wall. By the time people respond, it's far too late anyway.

There is such a magic, isn't there, to books? A book is just an object, until you have a reader. And then when you have a reader, you have almost like a rainbow that connects you with someone who may have died hundreds of years ago, who may be many, many miles away, who may have very different beliefs from you. But the book is in the middle of that rainbow.

It's not in the physical objects that you pick up from a bookshelf, and it's not in the mind of reader. It's that meeting point. It's that nebulous thing.

That's fucking magic, man. 

We've met for the first time today, and yet we have friends in common through Ted [The Last House on Needless Street] and through Riley and Oliver [Nowhere Burning]. I've been to the places you've been, because you created them and took me there.  

But also, those places are not my places. They're yours. They're completely different.

It's probably the biggest tool of empathy. There's no way to know how it is to walk in someone else's shoes, but the best goddamn chance we have is a book. 

That's exactly what Nat Cassidy said when I interviewed him.  

Really? That bastard. He's always stealing my lines. 

“Stories are empathy machines,” was his line. I think it's true. I mean, there's a common thread between why I love his work, and your work, and the horror community, and so many of these stories.

He's such a nice man, and such a good writer.

Can you say anything about what you're working on next, or is it still under wraps? 

Annoyingly, I can't. It's nearly finished, but I'm not allowed to. It's a complete departure. It's something I've never done before, and fuck knows.

I always think the last thing you did should always be your best thing, the next thing you do should always be your most difficult thing. And I appear to be doing that. I think it should always cost you, writing. You gotta bleed onto the page. You rip it from your chest with a bloodied fist!

And that's why I get invited to so many parties.

Ha! Maybe another way to say that is—what's inspiring you lately? Is there anything you're returning to or thinking about a lot lately?

The best thing I've read in ages is Virginia Feito's Victorian Psycho. I made her my friend, because I got writer’s envy with with Mrs March, which is her first one. But it was writer’s envy in the sense of, “Oh God, I couldn't have written this, but I'm so glad someone did.” And then with Victorian Psycho—genuinely, it's so good. It's a perfect book.

And also, Virginia herself is so lovely and contained and beautiful and together. This book is a rampaging, violent freak show that somehow tells you the meaning of life? I don't know how these things square each other, but Victorian Psycho I highly, highly recommend.

I don't tend to read very much when I'm writing, because I just find it too distracting. I start getting mission creep, so I cut myself off. I watch a lot of violent true crime and body cam footage, which I'm not necessarily proud of, but I use it to fall asleep, actually. I fall asleep to serial killers’ confession interrogations.  

I was just listening to a two-hour FBI interview with Israel Keyes, who committed crimes near where I live.

Not that any serial killer isn't a properly scary person, but he's a properly scary person.

My friend's brother-in-law reports on Keyes and has been doing a podcast for a long time. I started listening to the podcast after meeting him, because he’s lovely, and I did not expect the journey that took me on.  

I know exactly what you mean. I ran into someone the other day, who does expert opinion [interviews on crime shows]. I was like, “Oh my God, hi, hi!” It was very exciting for me. I expect less so for him.

And he said to me, “Look, you seem like a fairly intelligent person. Why do you care?” And I was like, don't you think we should know? Shouldn't we look it in the face? Isn't it our job, especially as writers or journalists or investigators—isn’t it our duty?

I have a few fun interviews in the works, but it seems like scheduling is extra tricky at the start of the year. I’m hoping to have a new conversation next week, but if not, we’ll both be surprised by the topic!

And an announcement: This week, I joined Macabre Daily as a contributor! I’ll be writing book reviews and interviews (including a review of Nowhere Burning), and I’m both thrilled and a little scared. Stepping outside of my comfort zone is scary! But it’s also going to push me to hone my writing skills further, and I’m looking forward to being part of the Macabre Daily community.

I’ll still be writing the newsletter, same as ever, and I’ll include the odd link here and there as my reviews are published.

Scare Me! is a free weekly horror newsletter published every Thursday morning. It’s written by Michelle Delgado, featuring original illustrations by Sam Pugh. You can find the archive of past issues here. If you were sent this by a friend, subscribe to receive more spooky interviews, essays—and maybe even a ghost story or two.