About the Book:
Consumed with guilt following her elder brother’s fatal accident, Holly escapes to the isolated seaside home of Gant House with her family.
But the house has a menacing history, and the restless spirit inside has been waiting a long time for a family as perfect as Holly’s to turn up. Who is the child, Lily? And what is the terrifying dark power swirling at the heart of the house, whose touch means death?
Can Holly uncover in time the truth behind the monster in Lily’s past? Or will she and her family simply become Gant House’s next sacrificial victims?
Find this book on Goodreads and Bookshop.org UK (affiliate link)
About the Author:
Cliff McNish was born in Sunderland, a city in the north-east of England on the hot summer night when the electricity in the house failed and all the lights cut out. Does this explain the darker, weirder shades of his fiction? Maybe… maybe not.
He has written many books including Doomspell and the Silver Sequence.
Guest Post: Horror as a vehicle for grief
My dark teen ghost novel Lily’s Monster is about a lot of things, but it is centrally about grief and trauma and the very strange, very weird, things it leads us to do.
A girl, Holly, goes to a new house… but inside is a little ghost girl so traumatised by her short hard life that… well, what would this little girl do? Psychologists tell us that victims of real trauma, odd as it sounds, often try to recreate it rather than escape from it.
Which links us back to out main protagonist, Holly, desperately escaping from a past memory. Or is she? Isn’t she also recreating her own tragedy?
Many years ago I studied in some detail the great archetypes in fiction – the stories we come back to over and over – and the consequences of loss – of losing someone really important to us, brothers, sisters, parents, close friends, is one of the top four stories we come back to explore over and over. And if it’s not the loss of a person, it’s the loss of liberty (think Hunger Games, 1984) , or the loss of self-respect, or the loss of hope, and so many other losses – and the story that follows is either a kind of desperate search for what’s been lost, or the tragedy of the loss, the consequences of it.
Think about the first Harry Potter book, what has Harry lost? His parents. And it haunts him all the time – it’s his driving force, Rowling never stops reminding us of that. And what’s Voldemort lost? His body and his power. And the story is driven equally by his desire to get that back. And Snape has lost Lily to Harry Potter’s dad, which sends him towards the death eaters? Etc etc – loss, loss, loss.
Almost every great story has a strong anchor of loss somewhere in it, and in supernatural or horror fiction often that loss if the initial driving force of the story if not the main thrust of the narrative.
In my previous ghost novels BREATHE and The HUNTING GROUND loss plays an important part, but in Lily’s Monster the story is steeped in it.
I’ve also always been tangentially interested in exploring what the Afterlife might be like in my ghost stories – if there is one. Often ghost tales are penned on the assumption that once the victim gets over their trauma they’ll seamlessly pass into the peaceful beyond. In Breathe I did the opposite of that: created a really terrifying version of that Afterlife (The Nightmare Passage) that people above all else want to escape from, not pass into. Too often, it seems to me, an assumption is made in ghost stories that our spirits/souls (if they exist beyond death) simply pass gently into what Christians would call Heaven, Muslims call Jannah, or the rewarding garden, if you have led a good life, that Hindus call Svarda. All main religions have their versions of paradise. But I thought to myself in Lily’s Monster: what if the Afterlife has its own ambitions, it’s own desires, in regard to ghosts? It wants you, you belong to it, you are dead after all, but what happens if you, as a ghost, resist it? What if your ghost refuses to leave the living world? What action does the vast Afterlife full of all the dead take? Now Death itself is suffering loss!! What might it do to reclaim you? And of you are not dead, but living, and you touched that Afterlife, if it even grazed you, what would it do to you?
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