I began writing my third novel, Hazardous Spirits during one of the many national lockdowns for Covid in the UK. At the time, my partner and I were living in a studio flat which shared every available wall with a neighbor in a block of flats. ‘Stay at home’ orders were in place until March 2021, and the closest I came to distraction during this period was waving, rather tragically, at the occasional passing canal boat from the window behind my computer. Eager for any form of escapism, I began playing Skyrim for the first time, and while I was simultaneously bartering my way through Windhelm, I started working on what became Hazardous Spirits.
The novel is set in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1923, and follows a woman, Evelyn Hazard, whose husband wakes up one day and announces that has acquired a new talent for speaking to the spirits of the dead. The book follows Eveyln as she tries to decipher whether her husband is suffering from mental illness, if he is a fraud, swindling people out of their savings; or perhaps most frighteningly, if it’s true.
When the novel opens, the world is still reeling from the trauma of WW1 and the mass deaths of the 1918 -1920 flu epidemic. My interest in writing a novel set so early in the 1920s was an urge to explore not the turbulent years of war and pandemic, but rather to imagine how people might be feeling a few years after a period of tragedy. It became something of an imaginative exercise during Covid to project myself forward to the challenges of the years after experiencing a gross global crisis, and the conflict between the drive to return to normal, while facing every day reminders that nothing could go back to exactly how it was, ever again.
In this way I felt sympathy for Eveyln, who is trying desperately to regain an even keel after the trauma of the previous few years. In her insistence for life to be as normal as possible, Evelyn functions to the point of denial. Her drive for balance and composure is put into sharp conflict with Robert’s surprising and somewhat scandalous interest in Spiritualism. Robert’s newfound talents pulls them both into an unfamiliar society of eccentrics and bohemians who are searching for new meaning against the context of the social and personal upheaval they have experienced.
The modern Spiritualist movement began to emerge in the late 1840s in the US, partly in response to a series of supernatural events purportedly channeled through two sisters, Maggie and Kate Fox in Upstate New York. These two young women interpreted a series of knocks and taps in their farmhouse as messages from a spirit, and went on to draw crowds to their public demonstrations. While Maggie and Kate Fox later renounced their gifts as a hoax produced by cracking their joints, a new movement had begun to crystallize around a central shared belief that individuals persist beyond mortal death, and that certain gifted mediums are able to communicate with those spirits to offer healing and enlightenment. The National Spiritualist Association of Churches was incorporated in 1893 in the US, and while certainly controversial in many social and religious circles, the movement reached a high-point of popularity shortly after WW1 as many people turned to mediums to cope with their grief.
Hazardous Spirits takes place almost exactly 100 years to its publication date; in the autumn of 1923. And yet, we are arguably experiencing correlatives in this process of meaning-making, in an increased appetite for esotericism, for horoscope apps and crystal healing, messages from ‘the universe’, manifesting personal affluence and fulfillment through mind-forged powers of focus and actualization. The promises of esotericism are seductive in their narcissism, they require little community, little commitment, with apparently abundant cosmic rewards. As I attended seances for novel research, even with my own politely skeptical perspective, I began to be aware that I was nursing a small, scarcely recognizable hope, that I might too, receive messages of wisdom and healing.
For this reason, the central question of Hazardous Spirits is a mystery that I’m drawn to again and again in fiction: how subjective are our experiences of reality? Belief in the supernatural is a compelling way to explore this topic, because our sense of the spooky is so affected by sleep, mood, even the time of day – an icy three am breeze in a locked room may be irritating for one person, and for another, a life-changing encounter with the paranormal. Some of my favorite books on this theme include Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger, The Wonder, by Emma Donaghue and The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley. All of these novels blur the lines between the real and the occult, allowing both characters and readers to follow the events of the book through a strange and meandering path in and out of belief. They allow us to conduct our own search for the supernatural inside the text, and to contemplate if ghosts are real, or only in the eye of the beholder.
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