Scottish writer Carole Johnstone’s award-winning short fiction has appeared in annual “Best of” anthologies in the US and UK. Her debut novel, Mirrorland, an Edinburgh-set gothic psychological thriller about two estranged twin sisters, the man they both love, the house that has always haunted them, and the dark and wonderful childhood that they can’t leave behind, is described by Stephen King as “dark and devious…beautifully written and plotted with a watchmaker’s precision.”
We chat with Carole about all things Mirrorland, writing, book recommendations, and so much more!
Hi, Carole! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
Hello! I’m a Scottish writer, who for 20 years worked in oncology at a hospital in the southeast of England, just outside London. I’ve been writing and publishing short fiction part-time for a little over 10 years, but in 2017, I decided to leave my NHS job, sell my house, move to the Greek island of Cyprus, and try to write my first novel. Once the money ran out and the novel was written, I returned to the west coast of Scotland, and spent a few terrifying months trying to find an agent and publisher for Mirrorland. Luckily, I eventually did, otherwise I’m not sure what I would have done next!
How is your 2021 going in comparison to that other year?
Scotland has actually been in a second lockdown since the 26th of December, so not a lot has changed! I have a very compromised immune system due to an auto-immune disease, so I’ve pretty much been confined to my house since last spring. It’s been tough for sure, but I’m lucky in that I’ve been able to continue working throughout, and I received my first vaccine shot a few weeks ago. Non-essential shops are reopening this month, just in time for the hardback publication of Mirrorland here and in the US and Canada, which is great news! In general, (and hopefully without jinxing things) it does finally feel like there might be some light at the end of the tunnel for all of us.
Quick lightning round! Tell us the first book you ever remember reading, the one that made you want to become an author, and one that you can’t stop thinking about!
The first book that I can properly remember reading was Roald Dahl’s The Witches. I’m sure I read a great many books before it, but as it gave me nightmares for weeks, it’s definitely the one I remember the most!
The book that made me want to become an author is Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo. It gave me my love of stories that are full of atmosphere, adventure, conflict, and suspense. It has a passionate love triangle and of course, it’s the most satisfying revenge plot of all time! I first read it when I was quite young and already writing short stories and graphic novels, and I still remember thinking before I’d even got to the end: I want to write a book like that.
Gillian Flynn’s debut, Sharp Objects stuck with me a long time after reading. Many books do, so it’s actually quite hard to pick only one, but when I read the question, this book was the first one to pop into my head. I love Southern Gothic stories and unreliable, complicated narrators; it’s a wonderfully atmospheric whodunnit that kept me guessing to the end and chilled me to the bone.
When did you first discover your love for writing?
I’ve always written stories ever since I can remember. I used to write a lot of shorts and graphic novels for my wee sister—usually involving Care Bears murdering one another, or the adventures of Noops and Piggy, who were the evil twins of Winnie the Poo and Piglet. I’d write great rambling whodunnits, featuring a grumpy Glaswegian detective, and I’d save them up until my family was trapped with me in a caravan or B&B somewhere, with no option but to read them.
Not much of my childhood stories have survived, but I do have a very surreal, early pencil-written short called Stupid Monkey chasing Scary Hanky, which ends with the immortal line: Monkey ha! – stupid Monkey – Scary Hanky is killing you Ha! Shadooy corner. (I want to sic Shadooy, with the assumption I meant shadowy; it is a Scary Hanky after all).
Your debut novel, Mirrorland, is out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Gothic, mysterious, magical, sexy, and scary!
What can readers expect?
Cat lives in Los Angeles, about as far away as she can get from her estranged twin sister El and No. 36 Westeryk Road, the imposing gothic house in Edinburgh where they grew up. As girls, they invented Mirrorland, a dark, imaginary place under the pantry stairs full of pirates, witches, and clowns. These days Cat rarely thinks about their childhood home, or the fact that El now lives there with her husband Ross.
But when El mysteriously disappears after going out on her sailboat, Cat is forced to return to the grand old house, which has scarcely changed in twenty years. No. 36 Westeryk Road is still full of shadowy, hidden corners, and at every turn Cat finds herself stumbling on long-held secrets and terrifying ghosts from the past. Because someone—El?—has left Cat clues all over the house: a treasure hunt that leads right back to Mirrorland, where she knows the truth lies crouched and waiting…
Mirrorland is a gothic psychological thriller about love and betrayal, redemption and revenge, the power of imagination and the price of freedom.
Where did the inspiration for Mirrorland come from?
So many places! I think a writer’s debut novel is always bound to be full of ideas and obsessions that they’ve been thinking about for a long time. For years, while I was writing and publishing short stories, I was always jotting down ideas for a novel about estranged twin sisters, a decades’ long love triangle, a mysterious and disturbing house, and a huge and terrifying secret. But I didn’t have anything resembling a detailed plot until I remembered something that had happened to me as a kid in my grandparents’ house in Leith, Edinburgh.
It was a big 200-year-old Georgian house and hugely eccentric—many of the elements of 36 Westeryk Road and even Mirrorland itself were lifted pretty much wholesale from my memories, and, in most cases, only slightly changed or embellished! At the very back of their house, there was a dark, cold, and forgotten room, and at its end was a vast wooden cupboard that was one of my favourite hiding places. I remember that there was a full-sized locked door in the back of that cupboard, and I was both fascinated and scared by it because I knew that this was the exterior wall of the house—the door couldn’t go anywhere. I was a big fan of The Chronicles of Narnia and always absolutely believed that one day that door would be unlocked and off I’d go to have an adventure.
Many years later, I mentioned that door to my mum, who’d grown up in the house, and she told me that no such door had ever existed. And this was really the spark for Mirrorland: I became obsessed with how memories, particularly childhood memories are made and all the ways in which they can be completely false. How fantasy is routinely used by children to try to explain a world that they can’t yet understand. It’s almost a form of magic. Because that imagination—that fantasy, that credulity—has the power to protect a child, even to save her life. Or shape what it will become.
I also have a lot of love for crime stories that are full of clues and misdirection and shocking reveals. I’ve been a huge Agatha Christie fan all of my life, and in the past I’ve also been commissioned to write Sherlock Holmes stories. I’ve always, always wanted to write a novel-length twisty whodunnit. The most satisfying thing for me as a writer is if I manage to completely change a reader’s mind about an event or a person, so that what they believed at the beginning of a book is entirely changed by the time they reach its end.
Twins were another inspiration, particularly Mirror Twins, who have identical but symmetrically opposed physical features and sometimes behaviours, and frequently report experiences of extrasensory perception. They’re such a fascinating subject to write about, and, of course, as a plot device, the possibilities are endless. From a personal point of view, my mum is actually an identical twin, and my husband is a fraternal twin, so I have some insider knowledge!
Can you tell us about any challenges you faced while writing and how you were able to overcome them?
Writing is always a huge challenge full stop. I’d say the biggest one for me was the change between writing a short story and writing a novel. In my teens and twenties, I started writing dozens of novels, but was never disciplined enough to actually get to the end of any of them. So I started writing and publishing short stories instead, and I did only that for nearly a decade.
The short story teaches you how to write sparingly. It teaches you pace and discipline, how to outline, how to create a tight plot and characterisation, and how to become your own best editor, which is invaluable. Returning to novel-writing was extremely daunting. Even with all those years of short story writing under my belt, and plotting the whole story of Mirrorland to within an inch of its life, there were moments when I felt very overwhelmed by the sheer scale of it. Novels can become unwieldy so quickly. Trying to keep hold of the story, particularly when writing in different narratives and time periods can be immensely difficult. Making it to the end of the first draft was such a relief. But I know for sure that I could never have written a story like Mirrorland without all those years of short story writing and editing behind me.
If it’s not too spoilery, were there any favourite moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
It is very hard to talk about Mirrorland without giving spoilers away! I loved exploring the very complex relationship between Cat and El, particularly the love triangle with El’s husband, Ross; how toxic even the most loving and passionate relationships can become. Writing about Cat and El’s experiences in the weird and wonderful world of Mirrorland was great too, because it was so different from the present-day narrative, and I could let my imagination have free rein. Weaving all the clues, red herrings, and reveals into the narrative was great fun too—when it worked! That was probably the hardest and most satisfying part of the whole process.
Far and away, my favourite scene to write was the very last one—the epilogue. I very definitely can’t say anything at all about that, but it was particularly satisfying as I’d had that scene in my head for a long time. The whole story was born from it. I can only write linearly, so I can’t tell you how satisfying it was to actually be able to write it down, to get it out of my head and onto paper! Not to mention the satisfaction of being able to write The End once I had!
What was the road to becoming a published author like for you?
It was long—as I think it almost always is! As I mentioned before, I wrote short stories for many years because I struggled to finish novels. While I don’t think having short stories published necessarily helped with getting Mirrorland published, they taught me so much, not just about my own writing and how to improve it, but about the whole publishing industry itself.
Far and away the hardest part of the whole process was finding an agent. I did a lot of research before I put Mirrorland out on submission. I found out who my favourite authors and those writing in the same genres as me were represented by. I looked at who had brokered the latest similar deals. I made a note of all the agencies that I knew I wanted to sub to, and then researched each one—every agent will nearly always have a profile including what kind of stories they’re interested in reading and acquiring. After sending out my cover letter, synopsis, sample chapters to maybe a dozen agents, I got my first full manuscript request within days. I was ecstatic. In the end, I got around seven full requests, and then…nothing. For months there was complete silence. That was far and away the most frightening time for me. I knew that agents generally have to read manuscripts outside work time; their days are spent taking care of the clients that they already have, but all the same, as the weeks went by I convinced myself that I’d failed, that it was never going to happen for me.
Finally, after nearly four months and many rejections I got my first offer of representation from one of my first choice agents. After letting the remaining agents that were still considering know, I received two more offers. I went down to London to meet each agent, and finally signed up with the brilliant Hellie Ogden of Janklow & Nesbit in the UK and the equally brilliant Allison Hunter in the US!
Once you have an agent, you have this immediate ally who knows a thousand things and people that you don’t. They have editing insights—a lot of agents will have you do another draft before subbing to publishers. And they have all these different strategies in terms of how best to try and sell your book.
Hellie had planned to take Mirrorland to the London Book Fair in spring 2019. But just a few weeks beforehand, she received a pre-empt for the TV series rights from Heyday TV and NBC Universal. Almost as soon as we accepted that, the book ended up simultaneously going to auction in the UK and the US. That was a very surreal experience; by the third round of bidding, I was in London meeting UK publishers by day and talking to US publishers in my hotel room at night. After final bids, we chose to go with Borough Press, an imprint of HarperCollins in the UK and Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster in North America. Since then, Mirrorland has sold in 11 other territories.
The whole process is remarkably strange—long and desperate months of nothing but waiting and doubting punctuated by moments of extreme excitement and stress! You just have to try and keep the faith, I think. Believe in yourself and in your book, and just keep on going, no matter what the weather.
What’s the best and the worst writing advice you have received?
Worst: Write every day, come hell or high water. Sometimes there’s a reason you can’t write. Maybe you’re tired, maybe you need a break, maybe you’re overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of what you still have to do. But most often for me, the reason I can’t write is because there’s something wrong with the story—something I’ve recognised subconsciously but haven’t yet managed to articulate. Often, not writing can be just as productive as writing. A day spent thinking about your story, where it’s going vs. where you want it to go can be completely invaluable—and certainly a better use of your time than trying to force out words that don’t want to come.
Best: Never give up. A writer’s life is full of rejection. A lot of the time you won’t even know why you’ve been rejected. Sometimes the writing isn’t good enough; sometimes the story isn’t good enough; sometimes the story doesn’t fit current market trends; sometimes it just isn’t someone’s cup of tea. Although success is often at least partly down to luck, you can still do so many things to help yourself. Train yourself to accept and use criticism: consider very carefully whether it’s actually merited, and either accept and change, or reject and don’t. More importantly, learn how to critically review and edit your own work—delete what doesn’t work and know what does. Research market trends by subscribing to industry magazines: look at what sells, read up on the big deals. As Neil Gaiman once said, “Luck is useful. Often you will discover that the harder you work, and the more wisely you work, the luckier you get.”
What’s next for you?
I’ve already written my second book, and am editing it as we speak—although I can’t say too much about it yet. It’s a very unusual murder mystery set in the Outer Hebrides, and all being well it should be published in the UK by Borough Press/HarperCollins around the Spring of 2022. I’m very much hoping that it will find a home in the US and Canada too!
Lastly, do you have any book recommendations for our readers?
How long have you got?? I’ve just finished two books:
The Mystery of Three Quarters by Sophie Hannah, which is one of four Hercule Poirot novels Hannah has written with the Agatha Christie estate. I’ve been trying to eke my reading of them out as they’re just so good. Sophie Hannah is a terrific crime and psychological thriller writer in her own right, and, of course, I’m such a huge Christie fan!
Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James. I think James is an amazingly talented writer. I adored A Brief History of Seven Killings. In general, I’m not a huge reader of fantasy fiction, but Black Leopard, Red Wolf, often described as an African Game of Thrones, is just so good.
I found myself almost subconsciously reading a lot of books about sisters while I was writing and editing Mirrorland. And My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite is a great read.
I’m currently reading an ARC of The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave, which is a really propulsive psychological thriller about a woman whose husband goes missing, and she subsequently discovers that he’s very much not the man she thought he was. I’m enjoying it immensely.
