Elizabeth Hand has no formal education as a fiction writer, but nonetheless has written over 30 books, including novels, short story collections and franchise adaptations. Based in Maine for over 40 years, she has won the World Fantasy, Nebula and Shirley Jackson awards for her writing. Her novel “A Haunting on the Hill” is the only follow up to Shirley Jackson’s novel, “The Haunting of Hill House,” authorized by the author’s estate.
As one might intuit from her accolades, Hand’s work is firmly rooted in genre fiction — science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, historical fiction and the gothic, among others, which she blends masterfully and seamlessly into formulations uniquely her own.
“Unspeakable Things,” her latest novel, falls firmly in the latter two, or even three, categories. It follows Olivia, a young artist living in 1920s Cornwall, England. She falls into a volatile and seductive relationship with the enigmatic Tamsyn, another girl living near Olivia’s isolated seaside manor. As the two circle closer to one another, a shocking death occurs, propelling them into realms of art, privilege and peril that they are barely able to understand. But danger doesn’t just come from the outside — it also lurks in the bond between them.
Hand spoke with the Press Herald about her creative process, queer representation, historical research and how Maine has influenced this novel set overseas.
The sheer volume of your work is just astonishing. Looking back to the first novel that you wrote, I’m curious about how your perspective on writing a novel has changed over time.
My first novel, “Winterlong,” came out in 1990. It grew out of a novella that had been published. I’d been playing around with it for a long time. I had no idea what I was doing. It’s been a process of trial and error, but by my fourth novel I started to have a better sense of it. You can see there is a learning curve, and there continues to be one.
I didn’t study creative writing, so I was always making it up as I went along. It’s worked to my advantage that I’ve done things my own way rather than adhere to any one path and any one genre over the years. Never saying no to something and trying things out all the time. Not trying to reinvent myself, but because I have a low boredom threshold I’ll be like, “All right, I’ve never done that. What could possibly go wrong?”
This book has subverted genre tropes around queer people in such an interesting way. Where does that stem from?
I’ve written a lot about queer characters from the beginning of my career. It’s something I’ve been writing about since the late 1980s. Not all my characters in my novels are queer. Not all the novels are centered on that, but a lot of them are. These are people I know or have known. That tends to be who and what I write about.
I’ve always been fascinated by the trope of the doomed woman who is trying to find her way alone in the world. She’s orphaned or poor, and needs to marry well. I wanted to play with that And I have this long-time fascination with the 1920s. That whole strain of writing and theater and music and art, which was influenced by queer people. It seemed like a fun cocktail to put all these things in together and add something that might kill you, but only in large doses.
I’m not going to spoil the ending, but I absolutely did not see it coming in a very beautiful, disturbing way. How many different iterations of the ending did you have?
I always knew how it was going to end. The different things leading up to it — that was the part that changed. There was this whole other subplot that involved a London policewoman who was investigating the crimes. I wrote literally hundreds of pages of that. There was a certain point where I was talking with my editor, and I said, “Oh my God, this draft is 850 pages long.” We both reluctantly agreed that we needed to cut it. Arthur Quiller-Cooch said, “Kill your darlings.” — not Faulkner, who gets the credit. This was killing a big darling, but it had to be done.
So you cut 75,000 words, or something like that?
It had to go. It wasn’t working. The book went through multiple revisions. There’s shorter fiction of mine that comes to me fully formed and doesn’t need a lot of revision. But the novels do. I love to write historical novels, and they take a lot of time and energy and effort with research, which I love doing.
I’m curious about what your research process was for this or your other historical fiction novels.
The 1920s are a time I’ve been interested in since I was in high school. I read or reread nonfiction books and novels that are set in that era and then did the kind of research that the internet is great for, which is just falling down rabbit holes. I don’t use AI at all, on principle. I just don’t do it.
I do try as much as possible to find primary sources. I’ll buy old magazines from whatever year the novel’s set. They’re a wealth of information because you get advertisements, you get fiction, you get articles about celebrities of the time, many of whom are totally forgotten. They have information about clothes, what things cost, all of this stuff. Then of course, after the book is done, I have a stack of moldering magazines that no one needs.
I’m always fascinated when I read people’s work about how other art forms influence them. The book has constant references to historical painters.
In most of my books, the central characters are some sort of artists. They’re performers, they’re actors, they’re visual artists, painters. I’m just fascinated by the creative process. To me, it’s like magic. How does it work? I don’t understand it for myself. Writing about painters, photographers, actors, musicians, there’s something tactile there. You can describe the work and what goes into it, unlike with a writer.
Did you bring any influence from Maine as a location, Maine as a culture, into this novel, even though it’s very much set in Britain?
The first time I went to Cornwall, where this novel is set, I thought, “Oh my God, it looks like Maine!” It’s very similar culturally and socially too. Traditional fishing and rural agrarian communities, but living on poor soil. It’s been impacted by the collapse of the fishing industry and by tourism and climate change. And all of the second homes. I’ve been here since the late 1980s. I’m not a Mainer, but I have seen the shifts. Quote unquote “normal people” can’t live here anymore. If I hadn’t moved here when I did, I couldn’t live here. I would never be able to afford it now.
Cornwall has fascinated me since first going there 25 years ago. I obviously don’t live there. I can’t write about it with that kind of knowledge. But the landscape is quite similar. I was walking around in these villages and I said, “I could live here, but what would be the point? Because I already live in a place like this. It’s beautiful.”
Sky Davis is a writer, producer and reporter based in Brooklyn. They’re a former senior editor on the Pocket FM audio fiction platform, and their work has appeared in The Rumpus and The Christian Science Monitor, among other outlets.