Q&A with Emily Carpenter

 

 

Emily Carpenter is the author of the new novel Gothictown. Her other books include Burying the Honeysuckle Girls. She lives near Atlanta.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Gothictown, and how did you create your character Billie?

 

A: Back in 2016 I was starting to come across a lot of articles about cities in the US and abroad that were offering incentives to people to move there to help boost their economy. I mean some of the deals were wild.

 

In this small town in southern Italy, they were offering medieval villas for free. It came with a price – you had to commit to spend a lot of cash in renovations as well as stay there for decades.

 

I was struck with how that could really end up being a deal with the devil, you know – committing that much to a town. And also very adaptable to the milieu of my books, that spooky, atmospheric, Southern Gothic vibe.

 

As for Billie, I knew she was going to be the driving force of her family, but it wasn’t until I got a job at my friend’s restaurant during the pandemic that I realized having her be a restaurateur was the perfect job for her – and an excellent reason she would want to move down to Juliana from New York.

 

The job is incredibly demanding and became even more so during the shutdowns, but Billie is a doer. She sees how much her daughter would benefit from wide open spaces, and she’s coming off this crushing blow of having to shut her restaurant down. So she’s the one who basically makes the move happen.

 

I loved creating this incredibly strong, loving, creative woman who has a ton of ambition and adores her family and who literally ends up having to fight for them and her life.

 

Q: You’ve said, “The South’s inherent contradictions are something I constantly grapple with in my books.” How did that play out in this novel?

 

A: I love the South, but I don’t think it’s possible to write a story – contemporary or otherwise – about it without acknowledging, even in a small way, the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow that exists here.

 

And so, that runs through in all my books, a kind of background hum to all the action. Those issues are not necessarily the subject of my stories, but the ghosts that those issues left behind are always there, in some form or fashion.

 

Specifically, for Gothictown, that issue played out when Billie and her husband Peter, who are native New Yorkers, discuss wanting to make sure their daughter grows up in a racially and religiously diverse community, so they’re doing their research to make sure Juliana isn’t some stereotypical backward Southern town, which I felt would be realistic for a couple that’s concerned about those issues.

 

Juliana isn’t that sort of town, but it does end up having other extremely dark tendencies.

Q: Did you know how the story would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?

 

A: I always know the ending of my books before I start writing them, minus a few details. There was one twist I hadn’t figured out in minute detail, but I really trust my process, and I knew it would come to me as I got deeper into the story – and it did!

 

Q: What relationship do you see the novel having to Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery"?

 

A: The villain in "The Lottery" is the whole town and I love that. It’s not just one bad guy or bad woman, it’s everybody that mindlessly goes along with this macabre, murderous tradition and they don’t even question it.

 

Nothing scares me more than that – the idea that a group of people will do evil and not even really question it, I guess because I question everything. But pretty much anything I could say further about how that relates to Gothictown would be a spoiler so I’ll leave it at that!

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m in edits on my next book with Kensington, A Spell for Saints and Sinners, which is about a down-on-her-luck psychic working in Savannah, Georgia, who after doing a successful palm reading for a bride-to-be, is drawn into the world of the young woman’s moneyed family, and finds herself drawn down a dark path she is not prepared for.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I’m excited to say that Gothictown is being developed into an AMC TV series by Made with Love Media and Emmy-nominated Abby Ajayi as showrunner. It’s been such an exciting process, and I can’t wait to see Juliana, Georgia, come to life onscreen.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Emily Carpenter.