HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: We've talked in this space about the joy of blurbing novels... and how, sometimes, because we are asked to blurb a book, we get the first look at a novel that the public has not seen before, and when we finish, we get to rub our hands in delight at the joy of having gotten a fabulous and exciting first look.
That's exactly how I felt when I was sent Katie Garner's debut novel, THE NIGHT IT ENDED. Reds and readers, it is wonderful, chilling and absolutely surprising. I mean, I never figured that…well, you’ll just have to read it.
And one of the main characters is a school. Let’s let Katie tell it.
CREAKING FLOORS & UNLOCKED DOORS:
WHY WE LOVE OUR HOUSES OLD AND CREEPY (…IN MYSTERIES)
In romance novels, readers sometimes choose books by their tropes: enemies to lovers, friends to lovers, forbidden love. For some mystery readers, it’s all about location location location. Haunted mansions? Check. Creepy schools? Check. Isolated hunting cabin in the middle of nowhere? Check!
Readers love enticing, hauntingly delightful settings. The first spooky house I came across as a kid wasn’t really a house, at all. But a mansion. I was about five and came across a book about Disneyland. I’d never been anywhere, and of course I wanted to visit, so I read the book over and over, but always had to skip one page—a page about the original Haunted Mansion ride. It terrified me.
But I loved, even then, the spookiness of a haunted house. How in the darkness, it wasn’t what you couldn’t see, but what you could. How candlelight flickered against stone walls and spiderwebs fluttered in dark corners and dust clouded the spines of antique books. I loved the creaking floorboards and doors that mysteriously opened by themselves. It’s no wonder, as I got older, I loved horror movies—but above all—I loved a good mystery.
As I read and started to study the guts of the genre, I began to notice (good) patterns. Most mystery and thriller novels seemed to have familiar yet interesting settings: a summer camp on a lake, a cabin in the woods, a city apartment building—a secluded boarding school. Each of these locations are, essentially, a creepy building. But regardless of what the building is, the concept is the same: humans live in structures with walls, windows, doors, and a roof. What happens within those constructs belongs to our imagination.
Choose from the smorgasbord of options and the end goal is mostly similar—thrill and chill—so why not have our buildings add to the feeling and emotion and themes of a book? For example, in THE VILLA, by Rachel Hawkins, our cast is trying to escape the rigors of daily life and have anchored in a luscious Italian villa, where whispered rumors ignite the plot and lead us straight into the house’s historic underbelly. The setting is the concept. The building is a character. And it works.
In Lucy Foley’s, THE PARIS APARTMENT, the apartment building houses our characters, and is the titular character. Same for the foremother of the genre: THE BODY IN THE LIBRARY and MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS, by Agatha Christie. The library and the train shelter our characters, but they are characters.
I have to move inward for a minute. In my debut psychological thriller, THE NIGHT IT ENDED, the locked room setting is a historic mansion turned private boarding school. It was based on a real-life abandoned mansion I’d visited, nestled deep in the Catskills of New York. And I fell in love. I fell in love with its once-marvelous splendor. The decay. The quietness. I fell in love with the attention to detail and the craftsmanship. I loved thinking about who else walked these halls, what were they thinking, where did they go. The history. The atmosphere. The smell.
It was something. It was everything.
THE NIGHT IT ENDED could’ve been set in a modern structure, of course. Or in a bustling city, set in a renovated brick building. It could’ve been set in a building like my old high school, built in the 80s and renovated throughout the years…but it wouldn’t be the same. The setting is its own character. A member of the cast.
No matter the book, the setting—and the building at its heart—doesn’t want to be ignored. It wants to be seen, smelled, touched, heard—it wants to be alive.
What’s one of your favorite locations?
HANK: For a scary book? I think old high schools are fabulous locations—when I think of the one I went to, probably built in the forties? With those lines of brick walls and lockers and doors we didn’t know what was behind. Yikes. It was formidable, then, but now it’s just…creepy. And the Boston subway stations. Rain and rats and electricity. Yeesh.
How about you, Reds and readers?
Katie Garner was born in New York and grew up in New Jersey. She has a degree in Art History from Ramapo College and is certified to teach high school Art. She hoards paperbacks, coffee mugs, and dog toys and can be seen holding at least one of those things most of the time.
Katie lives in a New Jersey river town with her husband, baby boy, and shih-poo where she writes books about women and their dark, secret selves. The Night It Ended is her debut novel.
THE NIGHT IT ENDED
Finding the truth seems impossible when her own dark past has her seeing lies everywhere she looks…
From the outside, criminal psychiatrist Dr. Madeline Pine’s life appears picture-perfect—she has a beautiful family, a successful mental health practice, and a growing reputation as an expert in female violence. But when she's called to help investigate a mysterious death at a boarding school for troubled teenage girls, Madeline hesitates. She’s been through tragic cases before, and the one she was entangled in last year nearly destroyed her…
Yet she can’t turn away when she hears about Charlotte Ridley. After she was found barefoot and in pajamas at the bottom of an icy ravine on campus, the police ruled her death a tragic accident. But the private investigator hired by her mother has his doubts. If it were Madeline’s daughter who died, she’d want to know why.
Arriving at the secluded campus in upstate New York, Madeline’s met by an unhelpful skeleton staff and the four other students still on campus during winter break. Each seems to hold a piece of the puzzle. And everyone has secrets—Madeline included. But who would kill to protect them?
Intertwining the narrative with the transcript of an anonymous interview, this stunning suspense debut will take you on a twisting path where nothing—and no one—is what it seems.
