Q&A with Darrin Doyle

 

 

 

Darrin Doyle is the author of the new novella Let Gravity Seize the Dead. His other books include The Beast in Aisle 34. He teaches at Central Michigan University, and he lives in Mount Pleasant, Michigan.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Let Gravity Seize the Dead, and how did you create your cast of characters?

 

A: I was inspired by the Michigan woods, which I’ve been spending more time in recently. There’s a rustic cabin that I like renting during the summer, and it’s about two miles down a narrow, bumpy, one-lane path, surrounded by trees.

 

I imagined a family in 2007 moving into an abandoned cabin like this (a cabin built by their ancestors) – how isolating and potentially frightening it might be.

 

After I had the setting, the family formed quickly: inspired by Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (one of my favorite books), I introduced two daughters as the main characters.

 

Lucy is 16, and Tina is 12, and they have very different attitudes about being moved from their established lives to start over in this rural cabin, miles from the nearest town, and homeschooled by their mother. Lucy, who is more pragmatic, is resentful, while Tina is playful, imaginative, and receptive to the new situation.

 

Their father, Beck, is determined to make this situation work, since he has bought the cabin from his own father, with whom he has a strained relationship.

 

The other half of the story centers on Beck’s great-great-grandparents, Loren and Betty, who originally built the cabin in 1907. They have two children named Lucille and Bernie, and their story shows the unfolding tragedy and trauma of this timeline, which ends up impacting the 2007 family in terrible ways.

 

Q: How was the novel’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: I originally titled it The Whistler in the Woods, but that sounded too similar to the existing novel, The Watcher in the Woods. I considered a few other titles before ultimately finding the one I chose.

 

Let Gravity Seize the Dead comes from a line in the story, and it occurs in a scene when the 1907 characters are burying their father on their property. To me, the line taken out of context sounds almost like a prayer, a plea: “Please let gravity keep this dead soul, hold him to the earth.”

 

There’s an insinuation that the dead might in fact return if not fixed in place, and of course this is what happens (in a sense) in the book: the dead are not truly gone but are instead entwined with the natural world. Echoes of the family’s ancestors resonate in the wind, the trees, the soil, the creatures of the forest.

Q: The writer Matt Roberson said of the book, “In gorgeous, mesmerizing language, Darrin Doyle’s Let Gravity Seize the Dead vividly traces generations of a family haunted by the horrors of place and confronting, as will readers, stark, brute truths about a beautiful but unforgiving reality.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I’m happy that he finds the language mesmerizing and gorgeous, since I definitely prioritized descriptive style as I was writing. In fact, I believe stylistic choices can help create horror. The wording used to describe images can create feelings of the uncanny, the unfamiliar, the strange.

 

Roberson’s quote also mentions the stark brutality of nature, as well as the concept that the natural world itself contains “hauntings” of the past.

 

What I mean is that I was playing with the idea that trauma is generational – not only for humans but for the land itself. Nothing is lost; even when nature replenishes itself (as it does), the landscape carries with it the evidence of its past traumas.

 

Ghost stories, in a sense, are all about how the past imprints on the present, and this story is a meditation on that concept.

 

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the story?

 

A: Above all, I hope they’re engaged and entertained. John Gardner famously said that fiction should feel like an uninterrupted dream, and I would love if the reader feels completely immersed in this world, these lives, for the duration of the experience. That’s always my goal when I write.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’ve been working for about two years on another literary horror novella that’s set primarily in the 1960s and ‘70s in Flint, Michigan. The story has occult rituals, curses, human sacrifices, a B-movie schlock horror producer, a talking parrot, a disappearing boy – and lots more!

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Thank you for the opportunity to talk about my book!

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Darrin Doyle.