I’ve always loved the idea of place itself as a living (or not), breathing being, a central figure in a story that retains its own sense of legacy, personality and atmosphere. Some of the best and most obvious examples of horrific landscapes include Count Dracula’s castle, Bly Manor and the Overlook Hotel, all of them adding to the sense of foreboding experienced by Stoker, James and King’s cast of characters. More recently, I’ve loved Sarah Perry’s Aldwinter and Andrew Michael Hurley’s portrayal of Morecambe Bay.

When I started writing about landscape and place, I wanted it primarily to evoke a mood that’s equal parts awe-inspiring and terrifying in its indifference: whether that includes trees falling in a silent forest, something rotting unseen by an abandoned car or, in my debut novel The Homecoming, eels writhing in a stream, tiles littering the ground around a house so the rain gets in. None of these occurrences is intentional or malicious, yet for me that increased the sense of dread and rising tension. Thinking of the environment as fundamentally unconcerned about the people within it – and by extension, unconcerned with their drama – helped to drive the ‘human’ plot, so the characters are forced to react to and interact with the space around them.  

Horror is a very elastic genre, with sub-sections of darkness from the supernatural to the occult, folk, body, survival and mutation horror or the more psychological, dread-inducing slow-burns. It could be that a combination appeals to you, but most likely you’ll find yourself gravitating towards a specific segment of this weird world and most likely that’s the arena to write into. Whatever it is, where the beats of the story take place – the wider landscape or a narrower setting – is as crucial as the beats themselves.  

When I started sketching out ideas for The Homecoming I wanted to create a convincing stage for the dynamic to play out between the two main characters: the first with regards to Ellen’s job as a ghostwriter, sent to record the memoirs of an elderly woman living alone in Northumberland. Ellen confidently believes this will be a job like any other, but everything from the train station, the taxi ride and then the walk up to the house was designed to make her feel ill at ease. In many ways she’s a classic folk-horror ‘intruder’ arriving at an alien and inhospitable landscape, to a crumbling wreck of a home. By contrast, her client Miss Carey is the owner of the estate: she knows its current and former state and to her it’s normal. I wanted to unsettle the reader and my first inclination was to do this by creating a strange, unpredictable character who has dedicated her life to managing the unmanageable at Elver House. I knew I wanted the house itself to play a key part in the story, for it to mirror Miss Carey’s decline, but I hadn’t fully realised at the start the total centrality Elver would have in the story.  

During the second draft, I really leaned into the importance of the natural world to bring colour to Ellen’s perceptions of the place. I wanted her to feel like an outsider in a world she thought she knew, and for the unknown elements at Elver House – the flowers, the farming that took place on the estate, the migratory pattern of the eels she encounters – to heighten that sense. This, I hoped, would in turn heighten both her increasing fear at Elver but also her protective instincts toward an elderly and vulnerable client.

These are some thoughts on what worked for me during the process: 

• Although many novels within the genre take place in more remote, isolated communities – thereby allowing the protagonist to feel like a classic fish-out-of-water – a horror landscape doesn’t have to be far-flung, and indeed an urban setting can provide a nice twist on the original model. 

• Research the folklore, history, rituals and traditions of the place or places you want to explore. They may not make it into the novel itself, or you could create your own, but they all help as background material.

• Domestic objects and trinkets can carry enormous power depending on the character – transforming an everyday place into the uncanny.

• Give the place a series of ‘keystones’ – specific features of the landscape, or objects – and include them often in the narrative to ground the reader: in The Homecoming I used the stream, full of eels, and the hydrangeas on the estate.

Writing exercise

Take a place you have written about recently – it might be the setting for a story you’re working on, a description of a landscape, urban or rural. Try to identify some ‘keystones’ for this place and write a new paragraph that utilises them.