Good Grieving, Spooky Readers.
Something rather special happened this month: Ghost & Quill recorded its very first podcast episode, and we could not have summoned a better first guest. Kat Dunn is the author of Bitterthorn, Hungerstone, and the newly published Rottenheart — a gothic, gender-swapped reimagining of Hamlet that kept me reading long past the point where the nightlight should have gone off. (My fiancé had to switch it off after I fell asleep mid-chapter, book still in hand. I can count on one hand the books that have done that to me.)
At our first ever pop-up shop, copies of Kat's books flew off the table — every single one sold — so it felt only right that she should be the first author to sit down with us. What followed was an hour of glorious, rambling, occasionally chaotic conversation about nightmares, villains, Victorian ghost stories and the strange case of the missing secondhand horror books.
What follows is our conversation, edited for length and clarity. The full episode — chaos included — is available on YouTube.
Let's start at the beginning. Do you remember the book that inspired you to start writing?
Honestly, no — because I've written since I could read, more or less. I have this really vivid memory of primary school. It was a chaotic school — it was the nineties, they did whatever they liked — and one day a few of us were taken to the quiet room and told: stories go like this — beginning, middle, end. Here's a worksheet with boxes. Write a line, draw a picture.
I actually found some of those little books when I was clearing out my mum's house. They were very much: she went to sleep, she woke up in a land of chocolate, she ate all the chocolate, she fell asleep and then she wasn't in the chocolate land any more. That level of complex thought.
But I remember feeling this great sense of expansive freedom. They put a worksheet in front of me and said fill in the beginning, the middle and the end — and literally anything could happen in there. That was quite addictive. So no book, I'm afraid. Just the experience of being a person.
Where did the darker side of your writing start making an appearance?
It's an evolution, isn't it? I've always been a part-time goth — I'm not organised enough to be a fully committed one, but you can see from the general collection of aesthetics where my love lies. As a kid I adored Scooby-Doo, Casper, The Addams Family. That kind of thing just pressed the dopamine button in my head.
But the bigger thing was permission. One of the things I've really struggled with as a writer is a terrible amount of self-censorship — that awkward-teenager voice at the back of your head going, you can't write that, someone will laugh. I'd read books where the author had gone completely off the wall and done mad stuff, and I'd think: why can't I give myself permission to do that?
Eventually it clicked. Publishing is hard regardless — you can write the best book you possibly can and it still might not matter if the timing's wrong. So there's literally no point doing it if I'm not writing exactly the thing I would want to read. And if I'm honest about what I desperately want to read, it's ten more haunted house books. I'm constantly googling “haunted house book, book about ghosts” and never finding enough. So I write one version of it, then another attempt, and I'll just keep going.
Do you get your inspiration from nightmares, or does it come to you in daydreams?
Such an impossible question! Ideas come from all over. You go around life watching things, reading things, having conversations, and sometimes something sticky catches — a setting, a character beat, an era, a scene where it would be cool if this thing happened. Sometimes ideas arrive a little bit connected; sometimes they float around as a line or two and slowly start to glue themselves together, like they've got gravitational pull.
There was a fanfiction author I loved as a teenager who used to put a disclaimer at the front of her stories: there will probably be quotes and jokes from random TV shows in here, because my brain is a pack rat. That's always stuck with me. I've got a magpie brain — it's full of shiny stolen things, and I've got a little magpie nest to keep them all in.
Of the books you've written — published or unpublished — do you have a favourite?
Well, obviously I love all my children equally and would never publicly admit to a favourite. But Bitterthorn will always have a special place. I wrote it at a very, very difficult time and it was a real companion in the dark of a book.
It's also where I had to level up, craft-wise. I'd been writing YA and was trying to expand out of that, and I was struggling with voice on the page. My agent put a proper shift in — it was genuinely one of the best creative writing courses I've ever been on, that brutal line-by-line edit: this line doesn't work, this line's cheap, you're better than this. I definitely cried on both her and my editor at some point. But I'm proud of doing that work, and the book kept me going through something hard. So — probably Bitterthorn. Don't tell the others.
Tell me about Rottenheart. Why a retelling of Hamlet — what is it about that story that captured you?
Hamlet is one of my all-time favourite things in the world, in a very specific way. I saw a production at the Old Vic as a teenager, with a baby Ben Whishaw as Hamlet — and I met the text at exactly the right moment, at the right time, in the right way. You have those moments as a teenager where you encounter something and it just shifts your brain chemistry.
So often Hamlet is an opportunity for a very established actor to come and do his Hamlet — congratulations, you're nearing fifty, come and be a grand Shakespearean. But this production leaned into a teenage Hamlet, a family dynamic, Ophelia's bedroom done up like a teenage girl's bedroom. And it made sense of that pure intensity of feeling you have access to as a teenager, which the world so often derides. It opened up the parts of the text that are about grief, and madness, and who is allowed to suffer — and in what ways. I mean, one of the earliest scenes is essentially Hamlet's mother and uncle telling him to lighten up. Your dad's dead and your uncle has married your mum — it's very reasonable that Hamlet is not okay about this!
It lived with me for a long time. And I kept thinking: there's still plenty to say about sons and fathers, but my God, do we have a cultural narrative around mothers and stepmothers. It felt so meaty to change the genders around and look at those dynamics explicitly — the way women are allowed to operate emotionally in public and in private, and what gets burdened onto mother–daughter relationships.
Rottenheart has two narrators, Odette and Cecilia, and they're such different characters. How do you switch between them — practically and emotionally?
It's a chicken-and-egg thing, because they've both come from me. It's not autobiographical — I'm not writing memoir — but for me to write a character there has to be a little spark of something from myself in there, even for the more villainous ones. Even just understanding in what circumstances I would behave that way. You take a little kernel of something you feel very much on the inside of, and let it bloom out into something bigger and very different.
I won't lie — I find these books quite emotionally gruelling to write. I had the same with Hungerstone, particularly editing the first half with Lenore's descent. It's cathartic in one way, but it takes a toll. My therapist once said: maybe this is just the cost of writing this book.
Practically, I write from beginning to end — I need to follow the story through the way a reader will — and I swapped between their points of view chapter by chapter. This one was tricky because it's a bigger cast than Hungerstone or Bitterthorn, lots of people with their own agendas. So with each scene I'd come back to that classic bit of writing advice: goal, motivation, conflict. What do they want, why do they want it, and why can't they have it? Or sometimes: what do they want, and what are they afraid of?
Does it feel wild and freeing to let those villainous impulses live out on the page?
Honestly? In some ways I just feel a terrible sadness, because people do these terrible things because they're suffering. We're all assholes sometimes — and if you can't acknowledge that we're all sometimes difficult or unpleasant or selfish, you can't honestly say, I'm sorry, that wasn't okay. So with these characters, there's a lot of “there, but for the grace of God and my therapist, go I”. There's a version of my life where I crystallised in a very different direction. Nobody in this book who's acting villainously is having a good time.
Though maybe one day I should write a book where the villains are just having a goddamn good time. That might be the liberating version. It's on the big old list of ideas.
Reading Rottenheart, I had to sleep with the nightlight on — it's one of maybe three books that have ever done that to me. What does that for you? What really frightens you?
I'm quite fussy with my horror. I specifically like the supernaturally ghostly and psychologically suspect — because to me the most frightening thing is your own brain. I don't particularly believe in ghosts or the supernatural, but I do know and believe that my brain is a badly organised machine that can go wrong. You go around feeling like your eyes are just windows you're looking out of — but no. You're living with an unreliable narrator installed in your own body, and it's very bad to not be able to trust that anything is real. So the horror that plays on that is the most appealing and the most frightening to me. I'm much less of a body horror, gore, monsters person.
And ghosts in general I find absolutely compelling, because we are all haunted — by ourselves, by our past, by everybody we've ever known, by history walking around. I live in London and stroll past the old Roman wall on my way about. When I was researching the gothic I read perspectives on England itself as a haunted house — particularly around the dissolution of the monasteries. This enormous act of destruction of things held terribly sacred, and then the shells just sat there mouldering for centuries. So much early gothic literature is full of monks and abbeys for a reason. You can go to Whitby Abbey and see centuries of etchings and watercolours and watch it crumble as you go along. That's the kind of horror that appeals to me.
And the books that have genuinely freaked you out?
Susan Hill is a classic — The Woman in Black, and a lot of her writing. Seeing the stage production in the West End was one of the most frightened I've ever been, because with a film you can tell yourself there are ten cameras and sound people milling about. In a theatre, it's happening to you.
Michelle Paver's ghost stories — Thin Air and Dark Matter — are fantastic; ferociously atmospheric and properly freaked me out. Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Mexican Gothic is one of my all-time favourites. And interestingly, I love Shirley Jackson, but she doesn't freak me out in a scary way — she makes me feel dark and sad, because the psychological disintegration is a bit close to home. Is the horror depression? Was it your own mental health all along? On screen, The Haunting of Hill House is one of the most frightening things I've ever seen — the grief was done so perfectly that it made all that beautifully crafted horror land twice as hard.
I also had the best time recently with a huge collection of classic Victorian ghost stories. They were such a staple of the market — a bit like supermarket thrillers today — and so many brilliant women novelists were churning them out to pay the rent. E. Nesbit, the children's author! Edith Wharton! There's one about a ship's cabin with an upper berth nobody should sleep in — the character keeps insisting everything's normal while you, the reader, are screaming at him to run. I'm exactly a hundred years too late; that's precisely what I'm after.
Here's a bookshop mystery for you: I can find secondhand thrillers, romance, adventure by the boxful — but secondhand horror books are nearly impossible to source. Why do you think that is?
That's so interesting — and it's a bit like how you can never find any secondhand Pratchett. People really want them. I was always hunting for cheap reading copies of Pratchett after borrowing them all from the library, and no — nobody's got rid of them. They all kept them. You must be right: people cherish their horror too much to let it go.
(We would also accept, as an alternative theory, that they burnt them out of sheer terror. — Ed.)
Have you ever had a moment where you thought — maybe ghosts are real? Your empirical-evidence moment?
Definitively not at all, I have to say. Part of it is growing up in terraced housing in London — my threshold for thinking a noise is suspicious is very high. Pipe, floorboard, cat knocked something off the cupboard. I've been to places that are meant to be haunted, and no. And so many people's experiences happen around sleep, and I'm sorry, that's just the brain going wonky.
If anything, the psychology is more fascinating to me than ghosts being real would be — because I think we construct these things, we're doing it to ourselves, and that's messed up and cool and interesting. If there are ghosts, I don't think they'd bother me. I'm chill with them and they're chill with me. But the past is very much with us psychologically. Very much so.
Last one: what's a question you wish people would ask you, but they don't?
I'm such a blank slate on this — because while I'm writing a book, and right up until it comes out, it's all craft thinking. Then the moment it's out, it becomes a text that people are reading, and I get to learn what I was doing in there that I had no idea about.
So what I'd love is for people to stop sticking to the script. Ask the weird question. The really niche bit. The thing you think makes no sense but you thought it anyway. It can feel invasive to go a bit off the wall — but honestly? Let's go. I'm buzzing.
Rottenheart by Kat Dunn is available now from Ghost & Quill — alongside Bitterthorn and Hungerstone, while our haunted little stock of them lasts. And if you'd like to hear the whole conversation — including Jigsaw turning up uninvited in Kat's dreams, my childhood walk through a darkening Zambian forest, and the crows who have adopted me — the full episode of the Ghost & Quill podcast is out now.
www.youtube.com/@GhostAndQuill
Stay Spooky,
Marlene