It begins with the protagonist, an Indigenous teenager named Junior, seeing what appears to be his father’s ghost-but his father as he wanted to be, in the role of a traditional dancer, as opposed to who he was in life. Mapping the Interior is a book about fathers and sons, though it’s also about land, history, and unfulfilled dreams. The blend of folk horror and the apocalyptic is not confined to the American experience. In reading, say, Lucie McKnight Hardy’s recent novel Water Shall Refuse Them, there’s something beyond beguiling about the way the novel’s plot involves small-town resentment of a particular family due to the actions of their ancestors during the Black Death. ( An article at The Quietus described the films where the genre developed as dealing with “brutal power struggles, cruel and regressive social hierarchies, and the land’s capacity for chaos and destruction.”) As I read more and more stories of the uncanny from England, I’ve found myself thoroughly entranced by the concept. It’s one that sits neatly beside the concept of folk horror.

I’ve seen the description “folk crime” used to describe Myers’s books. “Sometimes life gifts you such signs and prompts. “I was inadvertently part of their continuity, the latest link in a chain from a tough and troubled past to a modern digital world,” Myers writes.

It was there that he became interested in the life of 18th-century counterfeiter David Hartley, the real-life figure who became the subject of the novel.Īs he learned more and more, Myers discovered that one of Hartley’s adversaries had spent time working in the house where Myers lived. He’d left London for life closer to where he’d been raised he and his wife ended up living in the northern English town of Mytholmroyd. What effect can geography and history have on a work of fiction? In his introduction to the American edition of his novel The Gallows Pole, Benjamin Myers describes the process of researching his novel.

Trinity sight by jennifer givhan