Carole Johnstone‘s latest novel The Blackhouse is a richly atmospheric thriller set on an isolated Scottish island where nothing is as it seems and shocking twists lie around every corner.
Hi, Carole! Thanks for joining us again! With the new year now here, what are you looking forward to in 2023?
Thank you so much for having me! Obviously, I’m really looking forward to The Blackhouse coming out in January; it’s such an amazing feeling when your story is finally out in the world, and I can’t wait to hear what people think of it. I’m also really hopeful that I’ll finish and sell my current novel-in-progress in 2023 as well.
I recently bought a house near Glencoe in the Scottish Highlands that’s in need of a lot of TLC. I’ve lived like a nomad for the past 5 years, so it’s been really great to finally settle somewhere, and I can’t wait to get started on fixing it up.
Your latest novel, The Blackhouse, is out January 3rd! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Gothic, murder-mystery, secrets, multiple twists.
What can readers expect?
It’s hard to talk about The Blackhouse without any spoilers – there’s a pretty big reveal in Chapter 2, for instance, which makes the premise very hard to describe, but I do really think that it’s a story best read with as little prior knowledge of what it’s really about as possible!
The Blackhouse is a gothic thriller and an unusual murder-mystery set on a fictional island off the stormy west coast of the Isle of Lewis in the Scottish Outer Hebrides.
There are two stories, told side by side and narrated by two different characters. The first follows a troubled woman called Maggie MacKay, who as a child in 1999, claimed that someone on the island murdered a young local man called Robert Reid. As an adult, she returns to the island with very strange motives for needing to find out what actually did happen to Robert and proving that he was murdered. Her reappearance threatens to expose secrets that some islanders would rather remained hidden, and Maggie is very quickly forced to consider just how much she is willing to risk to uncover the truth.
The second story follows Robert himself during the last few months of his life, leading up to his untimely and disturbing death – so that the reader finds out exactly what did happen to him at the same time that Maggie does.
Where did the inspiration for The Blackhouse come from?
In 2017, my husband and I moved to the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides for about 7 months. We stayed in a very remote settlement called Cliff on the Atlantic coast, and as the autumn arrived and the summer tourists left, we suddenly realised just how alone we actually were. There were lots of storms and power cuts, little to no mobile signal or internet, and it would take us a whole day to get to the other side of the island to restock and refuel. It felt so strange to be living somewhere where you might not see another soul for days or even weeks. It’s a place so profoundly different from anywhere else I’ve ever known – as isolated and wild as it is beautiful – that even although I was still writing Mirrorland when we were living there, I was able to outline pretty much the whole plot of The Blackhouse at the same time. I just knew I had to write a story set on these islands. I missed the Hebrides so badly when we left that writing The Blackhouse felt like being reunited with an old and dear friend!
Were there any favourite moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
I really enjoyed writing about the main character, Maggie. She has a very disturbing past but is incredibly tenacious, and returns to the island so determined to find out the truth. Her reasons for needing to are very strange and yet completely understandable, and I immediately felt such empathy for her as a character. Maggie also has bipolar one disorder, which has had and does have a profound effect on her life, and I worked hard to make sure that I wrote about that as authentically and sensitively as I could. I now have a much greater understanding of and admiration for people who live their lives with any kind of mental health condition, and the great obstacle they can sometimes present to being believed.
I’m a big plotter, so I usually know pretty much how a story is going to go before I start to write. For The Blackhouse, I’d had the very beginning and the very end of the story playing in my mind like a movie for months before I began – as both have big scenes and big reveals. I was genuinely itching to write them for the longest time!
With The Blackhouse being your second published novel, did you find the full process more, less or equally as challenging?
With Mirrorland, the only pressure I felt came from me. I wasn’t under contract or with a publisher – I didn’t even have an agent. So yes, I did find writing The Blackhouse far more challenging. Partly because I was under contract in the UK, but also because I was terrified that I wouldn’t be able to do it again. Which, now that I’ve begun my third book, I’ve discovered is a terror not at all exclusive to second books.
Do you have any advice for those who may have set some writing resolutions for the new year?
I’m incredibly hard on myself in terms of writing goals, and as a result I very rarely achieve them. However, I do always achieve some of them, and that’s the best you can ever ask of yourself. By all means have resolutions and make them as ambitious as you like, but try never to lose sight of every single achievement along the way. Don’t be so hard on yourself that you can’t appreciate all that you’ve actually done. Just deciding to write something is an achievement in and of itself! I tell myself this stuff all the time and take no heed of it at all, but hopefully others will instead: work hard, have big goals, but please stop giving yourself such a relentlessly hard time!
What’s next for you?
Well, I have quite a lot of events in the first third of 2023, as The Blackhouse comes out in the US and CAN in January, and the paperback comes out in the UK in April.
Other than that I’m hoping to complete a good draft of my third book, which is another gothic thriller set on an island, but this time in the southeast of England. I don’t want to jinx it by going into too much detail, but it’s set in this amazingly eerie landscape of low-lying islands surrounded by creeks and dangerous mudflats, sandbanks, tidal surges, and active MoD firing ranges. The story is about drugs smuggling, adultery, betrayal, a very dysfunctional community, and of course huge and terrible secrets lurking under the surface, just waiting to be exposed!
Lastly, are there any 2023 releases our readers should look out for?
I’m so lucky in that I get sent proofs from other publishers in advance of publication – I’ve discovered so many fantastic new books and authors that way. But there are also loads that I’d love to read too.
I’m a big fan of the Australian writer Jane Harper and her next book, Exiles, out in January, sounds brilliant. I’ve loved every one of her books so far.
I’ve pre-ordered C.J. Tudor’s The Drift, which I’m really looking forward to reading, as well as Looking Glass Sound by Catriona Ward, which I’m hoping is on its way to me as I write!
Going Dark by Melissa de la Cruz and The Black Queen by Jumata Emill also sound great in very different ways. It’s been a long time since a new Kate Morton book came out, so I’m really looking forward to Homecoming, which sounds fantastic. And I’ve been hearing amazing things about Yellowface by the brilliant R.F. Kuang!
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