Photo by Gary Adams
D.M. Pulley is the author of the new novel Stone Mad. Her other books include The Dead Key. She lives in Ohio.
Q: What inspired you to write Stone Mad, and how did you create your character Mannie?
A: I've always wanted to write a story inspired by the rumors and lore surrounding Cleveland's most notorious haunted house, Franklin Castle, and this particular moment just felt right.
The extreme wealth inequality we're experiencing today combined with rampant moral corruption and the rollback of human rights all scream for a classic Gothic thriller.
The oldest haunted house stories were all about the rich and powerful doing terrible things to hold onto their crumbling fortunes, and I wanted to tell a version of that story set in the Rust Belt today.
My main character, Mannie Wallace, came out of my own experiences working as a forensic engineer and historic preservationist. I've been an insurance investigator and a building inspector, and I've had to manage being a woman in construction for over 25 years.
Mannie and I are quite different people, but we both share a passion for old buildings and we'd both jump at the chance to investigate a Gilded Age ruin like Stone Mad.
Q: Readers have compared the novel to the work of Shirley Jackson--what do you think of that comparison?
A: I think I must be dreaming to be mentioned in the same sentence as Shirley Jackson. Her novels The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle were great inspirations to me throughout my career and for this novel in particular. She is and will always be the queen.
Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: I never know exactly how a story will end until I finish writing it. I used to write exclusively by the seat of my pants, but these last seven years working to publish a new novel have taught me the value of planning a simple three-point arc for each character.
I need a vague concept of their beginning, middle, and end to build a rough map of the journey so I don't get lost along the way with them. I knew I wanted Mannie to start out troubled and to go through hell. You'll have to read story to see if she makes it out again.
Q: The novel is set in an abandoned castle--how important is setting to you in your writing?
A: My writing process usually begins with an abandoned building or haunted house. I've spent my engineering career crawling around attics, creeping through basements, and hanging from the rooftops of old buildings, and each one has so many stories it could tell.
I fall in love and become obsessed with a certain place and time and start reading everything I can find--books, journals, articles--going down rabbit hole after rabbit hole about it until a story starts to emerge.
In the case of Stone Mad, I became fixated on Franklin Castle near downtown Cleveland and the lost mansions of Millionaire's Row. In my historical research, I got pulled deep into the connections between the German Nazis and the occult.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I am finishing up a psychological thriller due out in 2027 about suburban isolation and inner demons where the haunted house is a woman's mind.
In this story, a middle-aged mom's "perfect" life shatters when a party guest lands in the hospital and she's left searching for the terrifying truth behind the mysterious woman's fall, a neighbor's murder, and her own faltering memory of what happened that night.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Gothic thrillers like Stone Mad combine all the mystery of a crime novel with the spiritual intrigue of the unknown and even supernatural. This story is for anyone that's ever walked through an old house or building and felt the walls listening and history whispering over their shoulder.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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