Hellloooo!

I recently read and loved the brilliant horror novel The Hollows by Daniel Church where a sleepy English village finds itself under attack from monsters on the longest nights of the year. Think Emmerdale meets 40 days of Night meets John Carpenter. It’s a thrilling read from page one. I was delighted to get the chance to ask Daniel some questions on this book - which you should all get your hands on!

Wotcher!

How do you like to tempt people to read The Hollows?

I’m terrible when it comes to plugging my own work, but I’ll do my best: it’s set in a Peak District village called Barsall in the dead of winter, cut off from the outside world by heavy snows. Tony Harper, a member of a particularly nasty local clan, is found frozen to death within sight of his own home, a knife in his hand and a mysterious symbol scrawled on the rocks nearby. The village constable, Ellie Cheetham, tries investigating, but the Harper family clearly know more than they’re telling. And then something out there in the dark starts preying on people, leaving empty houses behind. And then – the power goes out.

Initially this feels like a standard police procedural and then goes into terrifying horror mode and just seems to be about a rural village with a horrendous criminal family in it and then it changes fast! Was that a deliberate transition and why?

I started what became The Hollows on a train journey in 2014, writing on a yellow A4 pad. As a writing exercise, I started with the first thing that came into my head, which was the name ‘Ellie,’ which then led into a sentence about her peering down a slope at a body. I was en route to the Peak District at the time, so that became the setting. I only wrote a couple of pages, but it set up the central mystery of a local bad lad having frozen to death practically at his own front door.

I could already tell this was shaping up to be a long-form story, but I was already working on a novel back at home. More to the point, I’d no idea where the story would go, and in those days I needed a detailed plan of a novel before I felt I could proceed. 

But the idea wouldn’t leave me alone, and by 2020 I was getting better and better at winging it. if I could see a couple of chapters ahead, that would be enough. And so I dug the idea out and decided to explore it. 

I’d no more idea than Ellie about what was going on, but I knew she’d have to do certain things like retrieve the body, establish a cause of death and notify the family, and that shaped the first few chapters and helped give me some clues. By about chapter eight I’d decided what the threat would be, so the shift happened quite naturally. I’ve never encountered anything supernatural myself, but if it did it would probably come as just as much of a screaming left turn from the normal into the weird!

I won’t spoil the reader the joys/terror of first meeting the Tatterskins but how did they become your monster of choice?

The germ of the Tatterskins was the idea of ‘the people under the hill’: i.e. another, more ancient, race of beings that occupy places where humans don’t – and probably shouldn’t – go. Arthur Machen suggested in ‘The Novel of the Black Sea’ that the ‘little people’ of myth were in fact horribly evil monsters and nothing like the fey little creatures with wings we’re used to reading about, and that they might still survive in some form. Robert E. Howard did something similar with his story ‘Worms of the Earth.’ And aside from the elves/fairies, there are countless legends of similar creatures, often dwelling underground – goblins, orcs, kobolds, trolls and so on. I just foraged for material in myths and legends, taking whatever fitted. Derbyshire and the Peaks, in particular, are very, very rich in folklore of one kind or another, a lot of which found its way into the book. The Tatterskins themselves also owe something to the truly nightmarish ‘Children of Tanit’ in Jonathan Aycliffe’s novel The Matrix. But once they first appeared in the story, they took on a life of their own.

We meet the complex character of Ellie our main character trying to do the right things. How do you like to think of her?

She’s not your typical copper. She’s been through a lot of pain and loss, losing her son followed by the break-up of her marriage. That’s made her very guarded emotionally, although she has some close friendships, notably with Milly Emmanuel. But more importantly it has changed her priorities – she stopped being interested in promotion and getting ahead in the police, and initially she transferred out to Barsall just to find a less demanding position. But the job out there is very different from what it would be in a big city, and for Ellie, at least, it’s become much more about being part of the community and helping people in need. That gives her a purpose, and her life a sense of meaning, it wouldn’t have otherwise. 

This story is incredibly paced and once we realise exactly what the poor people of Barsall are facing we are running around with them to the stunning finale. How did you work to get that pacing so right for this story?

First of all, thank you. Secondly – writing from lots of different points of view helped, because I had to get inside the head of each of the characters (the human ones, anyway) who were driving the action, and explore how each one tried to get what they wanted, or just to survive. It meant I ended up with a lot of different threads which intercut one another – often quite naturally, although sometimes it was a case of cutting and pasting things into chronological order. The only characters I wasn’t in the heads of were the Tatterskins (thankfully!) but I knew what they were trying to achieve and how they’d go about it, so that gave a structure to the book and the human characters’ responses.

That said, a huge debt of thanks goes to my agent at the time, Anne Perry of Ki Agency, who’s since moved on to become the new commissioning editor at Jo Fletcher Books. (I’m still at Ki, now under the excellent care of the agency’s founder Meg Davis.) The novel was originally much longer and took place over four days instead of three, and Anne loved the book enough to work with me in condensing it into its current form. She is absolutely amazing to work with and I’ve no doubt she’ll accomplish great things at JFB.

What else can we look forward to from you in the future and where can we find out more?

I completed a new horror novel earlier this year, which my agent’s suggested a few tweaks to, and will hopefully be making the rounds in due course. I’ve almost finished another book, which is more of a twisty thriller – not something I’ve really done before, but I’m very happy with it. It’ll be back to the world of horror after that, I suspect!

As for finding out more, I have a website at https://churchman72.wixsite.com/danielchurch which I really need to update, and I tweet as @DannyTheChurch.

What great books have you read recently?

Fellstones by Ramsey Campbell, and I’m currently halfway through The Vessel by Adam Nevill and Unfortunate Elements Of My Anatomy by Hailey Piper, who’s one of the best and most interesting new writers in contemporary horror. Read all of them!