"A mingled inner and outer haunting"
Talking about horror, pregnancy, and the craft of creating tension and terror with Clare Beams
With Halloween around the corner, it’s natural to think about spooky stories, which ones speak to us, and especially, how they work—at least if you’re a craft-obsessed reader or writer! I love it when a book like Clare Beams’s recently published The Garden invites me to appreciate an entire category of fiction—in this case, modern gothic horror—that I haven’t sufficiently explored.
The Garden is set in 1948 Massachusetts, about a pregnant woman attending a highly controlled residential program for women who have miscarried multiple times. The house-turned-hospital, run by a pair of married doctors, also has an abandoned garden that may have supernatural qualities. The plot is slow-burn, and much of the book’s ability to create unease relies on Beams’s subtle characterization and masterful language. As a writer, I enjoyed this book as much for its sentences as its story, setting, and themes.
Thanks to Clare Beams for this interview.
Andromeda: Clare, you not only wowed me with this book, you actually made me realize how much I enjoy a certain kind of gothic or literary horror that I don’t yet have the vocabulary to fully describe. In my mind, this is an eerie, deeply thoughtful novel for people who may not necessarily read graphic horror of the most terrifying kind. But a shiver, a shudder, a deep sense of dread? The Garden delivers. Can you share your thoughts on influences and intentions—the emotional effect you wanted to have?
Clare: Thank you so much! You know, I think so little about genre when I’m writing that the categories my books get put into are often a bit of a surprise to me. I’m not sure I could have told you I was writing a horror novel, exactly, while I was working on this book. But I did know I was striving for a certain kind of mingled inner and outer haunting, because what I wanted to capture was the sense of terror that can come when you’re trying desperately to control the uncontrollable. Once I’d fully come to understand this, that I really wanted this terror to be an undeniable force on the page, I reread (Shirley Jackson’s) The Haunting of Hill House, just to remember how a true genius of this kind of effect—of summoning the kind of ghost story that comes from both inside and outside the self—had done it.
Andromeda: I usually don’t quote publisher’s blurbs, but this one nails it, describing your latest book as “An eerie, masterful novel about pregnancy as a haunted house and the ways the female body has always been policed and manipulated.”
I love that “pregnancy as a haunted house” concept. If we can start there—with the body as a house but also the novel’s 1940s-era medical facility as a more literal kind of house—I wanted to talk about both space and time in this novel. Aside from flashbacks and the ending, your story takes place nearly entirely in that facility, where a small group of mothers who suffer frequent miscarriages go in hopes of having successful pregnancies. Were you consciously aware that you’d given yourself a really nicely contained structure—one that turns up the tension—in that way?
Clare: I often seem to be drawn to settings that do this kind of containing, places that let me separate the world of my novel off from the outside world so I can pressurize it and see what strangeness I can grow there—classrooms, schools, hotels, hospitals. The drawing of tight boundaries around my characters, I’ve found, is good for drama. And since I’m often experimenting with developments that don’t quite fit within reality as we generally experience it, fashioning my own worlds in this way means I don’t have to factor in so heavily the various forces of daily life that might kind of pop the bubble of the mood and effect I’m going for. Here, I found that sending my characters into the separate world of the house-hospital—and then having Irene discover the further separate world of this abandoned walled garden and its magic—let me explore the kind of strangeness I was most interested in.
Andromeda: Paired with that confined and dread-filled environment, we also have a highly specific “clock.” Irene Willard is trying to stay pregnant and healthy until she delivers. There’s a lot of pleasing ambiguity in the book—for example, What the heck is going on in that creepy garden???—but the “clock” keeps us very grounded. Am I overanalyzing a feature of the book that came to you organically, or did you think about things like duration, and/or balancing the known and unknowns of this story?
Clare: I don’t think you’re overanalyzing it at all! Or if you are, then I certainly did. The clock of the story was very much a double-edged sword for me, for a long time in the drafting process. In certain ways the “container” of the standard length of time a pregnancy takes was another feature of the kind of pressurizing that the whole setting produces, I think—but it became quite challenging to make entire pregnancies pass in this one place, a facility that in many ways is emphasizing a certain kind of almost stagnant rest. I think here I was really saved by the personality of my main character, Irene, who’s so generally resistant as a habit—she’s the sort of person who goes around poking into corners she’s not supposed to poke into—that she prevents things from stagnating.
Andromeda: I wonder if you’d reflect on the differences between this novel and your last one. They’re both historically set, with a vivid sense of place, and I see overlaps in terms of themes. Both utilize fresh language and uncanny imagery, but this one feels like it belongs more in the horror and suspense categories, whereas I would have labeled The Illness Lesson differently. Feel free to talk back to those labels, if they seem limiting.
Clare: The labels that end up getting used to categorize fiction are interesting but do rarely end up factoring into the actual creative process for me. I remember when I was on tour for my first book, the story collection We Show What We Have Learned, somebody asked me, when and how did you put the themes of feminism in? And I was so utterly flummoxed. I’m such a from-the-bottom-up kind of writer, fixated in each moment on what I can do with this particular sentence or how this particular character might respond to this particular question, and matters of genre feel like such a from-the-top-down way of thinking about books, if that makes sense. In the case of The Garden the actual horror categorization has come as a bit of a surprise—the first time I saw the novel officially positioned that way on a list, I emailed my agent and editor and said Hey, look, we’re tricking horror readers into reading a novel where the actual monster is the patriarchy, or possibly oneself!
That being said, I did absolutely know that with this novel I was trying to push things into a still darker place—or a place that was dark in different ways—than where The Illness Lesson had landed. I wanted the haunting to be less sublimated, more undeniably, physically present, I think because of what I was interested in exploring about the experience of pregnancy itself.
Andromeda: Earlier this year I used your character, Irene, in a class I was teaching about characterization, because I saw her as an example of a narrator who was not “likable” in the reductive “let’s be pals” sense—she can be prickly and combative—but engaging and sympathetic in the broader and more important sense. For me, the keys to making her character work included her agency (she is the most strong-willed and active of the mothers at the hospital) and the access we get to her emotional life, including her relationship with her husband, a war veteran. Having said that, Irene can still be aloof and unknowable at times. Can you share your thoughts about characterization and how Irene came to you, or any steps you took to balance her more and less accessible sides?
Clare: I love hearing this so much! I adore Irene with my whole heart, and it turns out she’s a pretty divisive character out there in reader-land. Some people are quite put off by her anger, which I suppose is fair enough—but the anger arrived on the scene for me as soon as Irene did, and for me, I just wonder how on earth else she’s supposed to feel. She wants nothing more than to give the husband she loves desperately the one thing he wants very most in the world, and she can’t make her body do it, and now she’s been cooped up with all of these other women she doesn’t know or particularly like to be experimented on as a kind of last-ditch effort that she can’t quite allow herself to trust.
Those resentful, prickly feelings felt like such natural features of her personality in this place and time, to me, and they arrived all of a piece with her feelings about her husband—which are her one, crucial softness, and from which they spring. But also, her anger and natural disobedience turned out to be very important and useful narrative forces in a novel that is, by its definition, focused at least in part on waiting. For me, Irene is the person who says out loud, or acts on, the thought that anyone in her position would be having. This made her a real source of momentum, and very exciting to write.
Andromeda: You’ve been on a heck of a book tour, you’ve been on podcasts, you did a companion essay for People Magazine about the ghosts of Sandy Hook. From the outside, it looks like you’ve done everything and been everywhere all at once! At the same time, it’s never easy selling a literary book, including a hybrid literary book that combines genre elements. How does spreading the word on this book compare with your others, and how do you balance the writing and promoting sides of your life?
Clare: Thank you! I am definitely more comfortable with the writing side of what we do than with the promoting side—like most writers, I imagine. The real reason to do this is always the joy and challenge of the work itself, and I believe that more and more wholeheartedly the longer I’m at it. But I was aware this time around of wanting to make sure I did the best I could with The Garden publicity-and-touring-wise, mostly, I think, because The Illness Lesson launched a couple of weeks before covid lockdown in 2020 and a lot of plans for it therefore kind of evaporated. It felt like such a wonderful privilege to be able to go out into the world and talk about The Garden with readers that I didn’t want to pass up any chances I had. I’ve really loved it.
Readers, what’s on your Fall/Halloween TBR? Do you have any other literary horror/ gothic novels to recommend? Have you read The Garden, or Ira Levin’s classic, Rosemary’s Baby, another book that explores pregnancy as horror? Let us know!