Michele Slung, who has known Ann Arensberg since the 1970s, is the editor of numerous anthologies. Among them are Crime on Her Mind, I Shudder at Your Touch, Shudder Again, Slow Hand, Fever, Murder & Other Acts of Literature, and an upcoming collection of especially disquieting tales, Stranger.
MS: I'm always fascinated by the epigraphs a writer chooses to help set the mood or themes of a book. Tell me about the eighth-century Irish prayer, "St. Patrick's Breatsplate"--"Christ before us/Christ behind us," etc.--that you selected, which you then draw upon to name the book's sections. As you have it here, it's quite spare, yet highly evocative and hard to get out of your head once you've heard it.
AA: The prayer was supposedly written by St. Patrick. It is very long in the original, and I only took what I wanted from it. It exists in several versions, but, basically, it's a petition for protection in the night.
MS: Then there's Charles Fort, the source of the equally haunting second epigraph, "I think we're property." Have you read much of his work? He's an intriguing and controversial figure, isn't he?
AA: I've dipped seriously and lengthily into Charles Fort. (It's hard, though, to read him from cover to cover.) I first came across him when I was working on Sister Wolf. What he was looking for were anomalies. He wasn't really an iconoclast; he just always had a broader perspective and was interested in fact that didn't fit the established scientific view of things. He kept casebooks filled with instance after instance of what he called "outlaw" fact. It seems he came to believe in the idea of paralleled universes that intersect at various moments. The stories he collected in his casebooks are really about the interruption of unexplained events into the lives of ordinary people.
MS: Do you have a difficult time choosing names for your characters? Your place names? The choices an author makes in such matters are never really random. Obviously, names may hint as to personality type, or express something about the character's background, or even be picked for symbolic reasons. Here, after all, the very first thing your narrator, Cora, does is introduce herself.
AA: Some names seem to come out of my unconscious, and I would say that they're more inspired than invented.
Since I was writing about a New England village (Dry Falls--now that was one of the "inspired" names!), most of the characters had to have names that were English and Scots-Irish. I live in a small New England town, so my favorite sources for names were lists of patrons from programs for local events, such as concerts and dog shows, lists of library benefactors, and so on.
As for my heroine, the name Cora just came to me. Later I discovered that Cora comes from the Greek for "maiden," and was one of the epithets used for Persephone. Cora's husband's [Henry Lieber's] name comes from the German for "love."
MS: The book has a great opening, especially for the classically minded. The way you bring right out of the shadows, right away, those unpredictably shifting boundaries where our daylight landscapes merge with those of the underworld. Were you thinking of the applicable Greek myths? (It's also as if you declare: There's no going back, dear reader; once you've read these sentences, you're in my power. The book is a kind of underworld unto itself.)
AA: I was certainly working with the Persephone myth, partly because the relationship between mothers and daughters is central to my novel. Emily, Cora's mother, is a Demeter-figure, who searches frantically for her lost daughter, Hannah, Cora's sister and rival for Emily's affections. Since Hannah turns out to be only a runaway, she can be seen as a kind of "false" Persephone. It is Cora who is truly abducted into the underworld.
One of the devices which served me best while I was writing the book was the opposition between the upperworld and the underworld, the day world and the night world. I wanted night and day to be closely matched antagonists, so that the incubus invasion would be more threatening.
MS: When it comes to weird fiction, the state of Maine is Stephen King territory, the way Rhode Island is H. P. Lovecraft's. I'm a King fan, but I donŐt take for granted that you are, so I have to ask, did you think about this at all? Because you're a "literary" writer, it must be said that conventional reviewers seemed awfully nervous trying to get a handle on what you were up to. (The same thing pretty much happened when Updike published The Witches of Eastwick.) But, after all, Dickens and Kipling, to name just a few, made frequent, wonderful use of the supernatural. And Wharton wrote splendid ghost stories, and so, to even greater acclaim, did Henry James. What's your own relationship to horror fiction?
AA: Maybe I should have set the novel just over the border in New Hampshire. I had no idea about the King "claim" on Maine since I'd never read his books. I chose Maine because I'd lived in Boothbay Harbor, near Lubeck, when I was very little, ages four and five.
Maine stayed imprinted on my imagination as a kind of ideal landscape. I set Incubus near Raymond, Maine, because Nathaniel Hawthorne spent summers there as a boy. If there's any writer whose descendancy I'd like to be part of, it's Hawthorne's. No one understands the dark side of New England the way he did--although he probably thought of himself more as a moralist than a supernaturalist.
I'm not a horror fiction addict, although I've read most of the classics. My particular favorites are Henry James (The Turn of the Screw) and Shirley Jackson (The Haunting of Hill House), because of their emphasis on psychology. Perhaps I'm a little wary of reading horror fiction. I was traumatized at age nine by the Dracula story--a school friend had seen the movie and told me about it. I read the Stoker, finally, at eighteen, and it was even scarier than my friend's garbled version. In fact, I have to confess I still can't go to sleep in a completely dark house.
MS: Does it add to the fun of being a novelist, this pushing past what one might term the "normal" boundaries? Where did you want to go with it? Did you "scare" yourself?
AA: As for scaring myself, it's a paradox--I'd have to say I never feel more cold-blooded and detached than when I'm writing about sex or horror.
One of the reasons I chose to write about an incubus is because it gave me more leeway, i.e., fewer boundaries, than better-known supernatural entities. There's no set formula to contend with as there is with, say, vampires--no obligatory garlic, wooden stakes, sleeping in a coffin until sundown, and so on. An incubus in simply a demon who visits women in the night. The main source of details about incubi is the confessions of witches during the Inquisition, who were probably making things up to placate their torturers. So I had a field day with the incubus invaders and was able to bring in material from ufology, sleep physiology, and folk legends.
MS: In the actual, everyday world of Dry Falls, Maine, there are quite a few dysfunctional marriages and other familial relationships. Even without physical violations by visiting incubi, these folks are infected already with their own demons, isn't that so?
AA: I wanted my human characters to be completely three-dimensional. I wanted them to be active, not just passive victims of supernatural assault. After all, there's a battle going on here!
My characters react to the supernatural in different ways, according to their psychological makeup. Some fight, some succumb, some pretend there's nothing going on, others engage in wild speculation. Each character is both empowered and endangered by his or her strengths and blind spots.
MS: Can you talk about what you'll be working on next?
AA: Right now I'm working on a mystery novel, and I am thinking about making a priest be the murderer. After that, I have plans for a book about real and false miracles, set in an n Episcopalian retreat house. I guess the themes of religion and the paranormal still have a powerful fascination for me.
© Copyright 2010 by Ann Arensberg. Reprinted with permission by Ballantine. All rights reserved.
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