Following up from our last post Reintroducing… The Silent Companions, we’re shining the (spooky) spotlight on Laura Purcell. Laura is a former bookseller and author of The Silent Companions, The Corset, Bone China, The Shape of Darkness and most recently a contributor to the short story anthology The Haunting Season.

You can follow her on Twitter at @spookypurcell 🕯📚

How would you describe your writing?

I write gothic suspense with a historical setting, often featuring elements of horror or the supernatural. A movie producer once described my work as ‘haunted Downton Abbey’ and I’m pretty happy with that to be honest.

Your books masterfully marry together the historical and the supernatural – what’s your favourite part of the writing process, and have you always been drawn to the spooky?

For me, the research and planning stage of a project is hugely exciting. Ideas are flying through my brain faster than I can jot them down, and I love plotting out those key, pivotal scenes. History is a well of fascinating stories to explore and strangely enough, I think it was the reading of this non-fiction that pushed my writing in a dark direction. I found so much real horror in history that I needed to share it. The supernatural elements reflect my interest in the belief systems people would use to cope with such trauma.

You contributed a short story to the Sunday Times Bestselling anthology The Haunting Season – did you enjoy working in shorter form, and did anything surprise you about that experience?

The joy of the short story is that it gives you freedom to experiment. This works particularly well with horror stories, where sometimes a scary concept isn’t enough to stretch over an entire novel. My contribution to The Haunting Season – The Chillingham Chair – gave me the perfect excuse to try something I had been wanting to do for a long time: write a Jane Austen-style narrative with a ghost! As someone who likes to slowly build creeping dread, the shorter word count was certainly a challenge, but one that I thoroughly enjoyed.

You recently wrote a drama podcast about Roanoke. What was it like writing something for a different medium like that?

Roanoke Falls was unlike anything I’ve worked on before. I felt like an absolutely newbie! For the first time I’d been given the characters, the storyline and the setting up front and it was my job to bring that vision to life. Collaborating with others was an invigorating experience compared to sitting at my keyboard alone, trapped inside my own head. I also gained a new appreciation of how vital sound is to atmosphere, and how to use it to best effect.

What are you working on at the moment? / What are you writing next?

I’m very excited about my next novel, Something Wicked, coming in August 2022. It centres on an actress rumoured to have made a Faustian pact with the devil to achieve her success. The story blends my love of theatre, Shakespeare and The Phantom of the Opera under a narrator who may well be my favourite heroine yet.