And the Trees Crept In author Dawn Kurtagich sat down with us at NYCC 2016 to talk about her books, her love of horror, and who she wants to direct an adaptation of her novel.
Finding Dawn Kurtagich was a happy accident on my part. I saw the cover of her book And the Trees Crept In and thought it looked spooky and intriguing, and in this case, judging a book by its cover was the right call.
You can read my review of And the Trees Crept In, but suffice it to say the book is at once terrifyingly creepy and heartwarmingly hopeful. It’s a rare instance when those two elements can be combined into the same story.
Ever enthusiastic, colorful, well-spoken, and insightful, Dawn Kurtagich told us what made Trees different from her first novel, The Dead House, which books and movies have inspired her most, and whether or not we may be seeing one of her stories on the big (or little) screen some day.
Karen Rought: I read And The Trees Crept In and it blew my mind, first of all. And I really want to read your first book, too. I’m just starting to get into horror, so it was the perfect combination. It was scary, but it also had that great twist that made it feel really different and cool.
Dawn Kurtagich: That’s really, really nice to hear. I worry sometimes that it’s too dark. The Dead House is a very dark book. It’s much darker than And the Trees Crept In, but I’m glad it’s more than that. I was hoping that what I write is more than just the scares. For And the Trees Crept In, I said in the panel [at NYCC 2016], when I set out to write it, I really wanted it to be a love story. But it’s a very horrifying thing to go through. I won’t give spoilers, but having read it, you understand. The Dead House is a similar thing. I just wanted to have a story about these sisters who love each other, and they have the whole world saying that they’re not really real. So it’s really good to know that someone who’s just getting into horror can like it for that as well. It’s refreshing, actually, to read that.
KR: What draws you to the horror genre and what got you into that?
DK: You know, it was an accident. When I started writing The Dead House, I didn’t realize it was a horror. It was a scary situation that I was in, being sick and waiting for transplant, and I suppose that’s why it became horror — because I was so scared of the things that were happening at the time. But I think, naturally, I tend to go for darker stories anyway, so even if I write fantasy, it’s going to be fantasy horror; even if I write romance, like And the Trees Crept In, it’s romance horror. I really like the darker stories. There’s something about them. There’s more to explore. There’s a darkness inside all of us, and it’s something we don’t really get to think about, and I just enjoy that side of it.
KR: What was it about And the Trees Crept In that was the most challenging to write?
DK: The romance, actually, and I think I’ve spoken about this before. I did have this aim of writing this big romance novel that was horrific in some ways, and what I ended up with in the end was a love story between sisters because that’s in the end what the book is about, and the romance feeds into that. But I think that was the most challenging thing, the balance between what was horrifying about the story and what was compelling and beautiful. I couldn’t let one thing overwhelm the other. I think the ending, which I knew going in, I had to hide that —
KR: You did it really well.
DK: Thank you! Well, sometimes I know the ending going in and sometimes I don’t. With this one, I did. With The Dead House, I absolutely did not, and I still don’t kind of know what I think, which is weird for an author to say. With And the Trees Crept In, that was a key thing. Was I revealing too much? What would happen in that situation? Again, I won’t spoil anything, but when you get to the end and you know where she is and what she’s going through, what is that experience? How do you describe it? Those were the two challenges, the romance and the environment.
KR: And what was different about your approach to this book compared to the last one? How did you handle the genre differently, and what did you do to make it really stand out and make it feel like a whole new story?
DK: Well, first, I’m glad it does. It has elements that I guess are similar, and I guess there are always things authors repeat in exploring, and one of them for The Dead House and this book was partially about memory. I think the main thing that made it different was circumstance. The Dead House, I wrote after transplant. I had as much time as I wanted. I wrote it in kind of a fever in Scrivener. I had all these tabs open. Every time I thought of something, I’d open a new tab and just write, kind of free form. I had 600 tabs and then I had to kind of piece together the story and it was a bit like building an engine. Whereas, with And the Trees Crept In, I wrote it in a very linear way, and I still have little pieces with her diary entries and whispernotes, for Silla. But, by necessity, because it was a book that I had to approve with my publishers, I had to think of the whole story. I had to write a detailed synopsis. So I knew much more going in than I did with The Dead House. I didn’t pants The Dead House, necessarily. I sort of had a quasi structure, but I pantsed in between my core points. With And the Trees Crept In, I knew what had to be said, for the most part, and I just kind of wrote in a linear way.
KR: What made you decide to play with the typography in this book? Because, honestly, that was my favorite part. It worked so well, and I was surprised. It’s very different. I haven’t read a lot of books like that.
DK: I’m fascinated with ergodic fiction. When I first read House of Leaves — that’s an ergodic fiction, ergodic meaning the way the words are laid out on the page has a psychological impact on how readers absorb the story. So in House of Leaves, it’s about this house that has a room inside of it that is ever-expanding, and the inside inside of the house is bigger than the outside of the house in terms of measurement. Mark Danielewski is just the master of this. He uses the way the words are placed on the page to convey claustrophobia, to convey space, to convey all these different things. I was fascinated by this because it enhanced my reading. I’m dyslexic, so I really pay attention to the way the words look on the page.
After I read House of Leaves, I was like, I want to do this. I want to do this in my stories. It really has a psychological impact. I did it with The Dead House, too. The Dead House is a completely format book, more so than And the Trees Crept In. It helps me get into the story when I’m writing it. It helps me to, you know, if I say in And the Trees Crept In, that the house of sinking, and then the words are actually sinking, I feel like I’m falling with the house. It has an effect on your mind. I love the idea that a book is a piece of art, more than just a text. That was more apparent in The Dead House. With And the Trees Crept In, we wanted to keep it cleaner and focus more on the actual typography. But, yeah, books as a piece of art and as an experience, I love that. I love that idea.
KR: What books and movies inspire you?
DK: So many. I love The Tale of the Two Sisters. I don’t know if you’ve seen The Uninvited, where a girl comes back from a mental ward and she’s back home with her sister and her step-mother. The original is a K-Film, and it’s called Tale of Two Sisters. And it has, again, that sort of twist ending that really makes you think about what you’ve just seen. I wont give it away because I think you should watch it.
Books like House of Leaves. I just finished reading a book called I’m Thinking of Ending Things, and I’m so glad that I vlogged this book because I vlogged what I thought was going to happen, and then it did. But it’s such a bendy, mind-twisting story. What other films? Eerie sort of Asian films like Hansel and Gretel, where reality isn’t quite reality. They’e going through the woods and they find this red door standing in the middle of the woods and they go through and it’s a different place. Anything that is mind bending, like Cloud Atlas, really love that. Anything that’s to the left of reality, that’s my domain.
KR: What about standalone novels? What draws you to those in particular?
DK: I think the tidiness of them. I won’t always do standalone novels, but horror works really well for standalones. I think that when you are putting yourself through a tense expense and there’s suspense, I think a cliffhanger ending is just a bit too cruel. With a psychological horror, I don’t think that a cliffhanger ending works when you’ve got a year to wait. I might change my mind about this, but right now I think that it’s just too much to ask a reader, to be in that state for that long, and when you’re writing a book like mine, when you’re asking a whole bunch of questions, you have to deliver on those questions. Otherwise your readers hate you, and it’s already horror. They’d be like, “Screw you, man. Like, what the hell did I just read? I gotta wait?” So, yeah, for psychological horror, standalones are nice and neat. They ask a question about reality or people, and to have that answer by the end, is something that I think is important.
KR: And do you believe in having all the answers right there, or do you like to leave it open?
DK: You should definitely read The Dead House [laughs]. No, I believe in open endings. I trust my readers. When I first brought [Dead House] into publishing, my agents and my editors were saying, “Can we not have a more conclusive ending?” And it was something that I really had to say, like, this is not what I’m doing. I trust my readers. I need to trust them. They are people with minds. They think. They can work things out. Everything that they need is in the book, but I’m not going to decide for them what they think because at the end of the day, it’s a question of one side or the other. And readers always ask me, “Well, what is the answer?” And I always reply, “Well, what do you think?” Because I don’t know. I might think something one day and something else another day. I do believe in not having all the answers, and that’s kind of like life. And horror is about not having the answers. And the Trees Crept In, you do get all the answers. It’s worth having all the answers, but not every time.
KR: You were talking about even if you wrote fantasy, it would always have a horror twist on it, but what project would you like to tackle that maybe would take you outside your comfort zone or would really challenge you?
DK: I am working on several projects, actually, that I can’t talk about. But the things I find difficult to deal with are things that are traumatic for children, and there is a place for that kind of story and there is a place for that kind of story in thrillers, especially psychological thrillers, because a lot of what happens to us and a lot of the way we are as adults can be fed back to when we were children. That, particularly, is difficult, and it’s something that I’m working with in a current project, but it’s not easy because you really have to go there. The other thing I’d like to tackle is a really dark fantasy that is taking me, like, 10 years to do. I’ve written it, like, 23 times. My agent is like, “Dawn, okay, we need to get this done now.” I know! It’s coming, it’s coming. So, yeah, that’s a challenge for me just because there’s so much to it, and when you’ve got a fantasy world, you’ve got to build the religion, you’ve got to build everything. I love that challenge, but I’m yet to get it right.
KR: I feel like this is a really common question, but worth asking anyway. What about movie rights? I noticed in [And the Trees Crept In] that the cinematography would be really cool with the way that the house changes. Has that ever come up? Are you interested in that sort of thing?
DK: I love movies. The movies rights for [And the Trees Crept In] haven’t been sold, yet. But the TV rights for The Dead House have been sold. I don’t know how far we are in the process. We’ve got a writer. I don’t actually know how far along that is. Authors find out after the fact. But if I could do The Dead House as a TV series, that would be amazing. In terms of And the Trees Crept In, I agree, I think it would be an amazing movie in terms of the [surrealism] of the environment. Let’s hope, right?
KR: Yeah. I mean, I’ll watch it.
DK: Tim Burton, I’m waiting for your call. [laughs]
KR: That’s would be so amazing! [laughs] And last question: Your upcoming project, your next one, what can you tell us about that?
DK: I can tell you that it is a historical horror, very Gothic, and I can tell you that it has more supernatural elements than I’ve dealt with before and more devil elements than I’ve dealt with before. It’s a really dark exploration of that side of things. And there’s no electricity so things might get kind of dark and spooky.